Almost anyone who studied social psychology in the last 50 years has likely heard of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (1933–2024) and his famous (infamous?) Stanford Prison Experiment:

…a social psychology study in which college students became prisoners or guards in a simulated prison environment. The experiment, funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, took place at Stanford University in August 1971. It was intended to measure the effect of role-playing, labeling, and social expectations on behaviour over a period of two weeks. However, mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly that principal investigator Philip G. Zimbardo terminated the experiment after only six days.

Britannica

Much more could be — and has been — said about how all that transpired:

In 1971, seeking a novel way to study how situations can transform behavior, Dr. Zimbardo set up a prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building.

He turned rooms into cells. He made a tiny closet into “the hole” — solitary confinement. And he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.”

 New York Times obituary, October 24, 2024

Then,

As the experiment progressed, conditions rapidly deteriorated, and the line between role-playing and reality collapsed. The outcome, as Zimbardo later acknowledged, was “shocking and unexpected” and “out-of-control.” Some guards became tyrannical and abusive in their behavior toward prisoners. For the prisoners, the experience led to acute anxiety, emotional depression, crying, and rage.

Stanford Report obituary, October 18, 2024

It Was the Perfect Teachable Topic

The lessons to be learned were so clear. And, what is much better, they were exactly what teachers might hope and expect:

“Most people go about their daily life assuming that they have more control over their behavior than they actually do,” wrote a young psychology professor at Stanford University in 1971. “We are often unaware of the tremendous power which social situations exert upon us to shape, guide, and manipulate our behavior.” 

Los Angeles Times obituary, October 20, 2024

Zimbardo’s opinions were, of course, greatly sought after in assessing the causes and outcomes of prison breaks and prisoner abuse. He went on to publish much more along these lines.

One testimony to the endurance of his work is a film, The Stanford Prison Experiment, made in 2015:

Now Comes a Demand for Retraction…

About five months after Zimbardo’s death last October, an article appeared at Retraction Watch, asking “Should Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment be retracted?” (March 10, 2025) The guest author is Augustine Brannigan, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Calgary.

He brings to light a number of less-publicized facts, including these:

• There have long been questions about the experiment within the discipline, probably drowned out by the publicity:

The study has always been treated with skepticism by penologists and psychologists, and recent scholarship by social scientist Thibault Le Texier has raised fundamental questions about the scientific validity of the investigation, the originality of the research design, the unethical treatment of the subjects, and the credibility of the reported results.

• Sociologist Thibault Le Texier started researching it in detail in 2014, intending to make a documentary for French media. But his research took him in quite another direction. From the Abstract of his open-access paper:

Data collected from a thorough investigation of the SPE archives and interviews with 15 of the participants in the experiment further question the study’s scientific merit. These data are not only supportive of previous criticisms of the SPE, such as the presence of demand characteristics, but provide new criticisms of the SPE based on heretofore unknown information. These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo’s classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. 

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. Am Psychol. 2019 Oct;74(7):823-839. doi: 10.1037/amp0000401. Epub 2019 Aug 5. PMID: 31380664.

• Brannigan comments at Retraction Watch:

Le Texier argues the SPE was not a scientific experiment at all, but a demonstration created to depict the evils of incarceration based on the supposition that institutions can make normal people act in pathological ways. Although Zimbardo’s results were not reported in peer-reviewed journals until 1973, he communicated his “findings” by press release at the end of Monday, the first full day of the experiment. The experiment started to attract press coverage by the following Thursday.

A bloody attempted prison break at San Quentin State Prison the day after the experiment ended was followed within weeks by a major prison riot at Attica Correctional Facility. In the shadow of these events, Zimbardo’s findings skyrocketed to national prominence as the SPE was invoked as context to this violence. Within a month, Zimbardo found himself speaking as an expert to a congressional subcommittee on criminal justice policies.

Much more at the link. So how much was sociology and how much was the politics of reform?

Brannigan does not sound altogether serious about retraction at this late date. But the challenge he issues should be heeded: Beware of wildly popular sociology that tells us that our public policy preferences are somehow embedded in human nature. Life was never as simple as that.

Here’s a full episode of National Geographic (December 17, 2024) on the experiment:

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.