Brian Resnick's Science Reporter here at Vox. I feel like I heard a bunch about the Stanford

Prison Experiment in college, and then I pretty much forgot about it. And then suddenly

this summer, it's been everywhere. I see it in the news everywhere. What is this thing,

Brian? What's going on?

The Stanford Prison Experiment is a part of this group of studies that are trying to explain

evil.

It's 1971, and where it's Stanford University, and Phillips-Imbardo is a researcher there.

He's wondering, what is it that brings out bad behavior in people? And the working hypothesis

going into the Stanford Prison Study is that it's circumstance that some of us are put

into positions of power, and some of us are put in positions of weakness. And in those

circumstances, a natural thing happens where the people in power abuse the people who are

in less power. So this Stanford Prison Experiment kind of really went for this. They constructed

a mock prison in the basement of Stanford Psychology Building, and they recruited this

group of young men. They got paid around $15 a day, and the participants were randomly

sorted into different groups. Half of them became the guards of this prison responsible

for keeping the prisoners in line, and half of them were prisoners. So it started off

with the prisoners getting arrested, like a mock arrest.

It was a real cop car. It was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street

who didn't know that I was, that this was an experiment.

They were brought to this prison, which had no windows. They had no way to keep time throughout

the day. The power differences were set up from the beginning. So the prisoners were stripped,

they were delounced. They had to wear stockings on their head to simulate being like their

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