July 5, 2018 • 46 mins
The infamous Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't really much of an experiment as it turns out. It was more like a poorly thought out exercise conducted by a professor who didn't dot the i's and cross the t's. Listen in as Josh and Chuck give this experiment some harsh treatment of their own.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everyone, We're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix,
Arizona this fall. Yeah, October, we're going to be at
Salt Lake Cities Grand Theater and then the next night
October will be in Phoenix. And we added a second
show to our Melbourne show, right, that's right, a second
earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the
information for all of these shows at s y s
(00:22):
K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. So why don't you pull
(00:42):
up a chair, kick back and tell us about your problems?
Because this is psychology stuff. We should just call this
episode the Stanford Prison Experiment a k a. Perhaps the
happiest experiment of all time, and it's really not an
experiment anyway, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever. Yeah.
(01:07):
I got kind of ticked off while I was researching this,
you should, man, because I used to think it was cool, like,
oh man, what a cool experiment. Yeah, everybody's evil and
it's core. Yeah. Then I researched it, and I was like,
this is a bunch of bs, all of it. This
is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.
That is so funny because I while I was researching this,
I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together.
(01:29):
Maybe at the end I can really go off from
let's go off at the beginning. That's great. Man. I
watched the movie today to yeah, how was it? How
was Billy crude up? Because I loved him in almost
famous Well, I'm a fan, he's he was good. Um,
But like, I don't know, the movie A was pretty
sensationalized as far as the violence. Like they showed a
(01:52):
lot of straight up physical violence in the movie which
supposedly didn't occur, um, like beating them with billy clubs
and hog tying them in like like real violence. How actually,
these days I should say at Lanta, Yeah, Uh, y'allywood
is what they call it. Oh, there you go. Perfect,
(02:14):
That's that's perfect. That sounds like a Norman Reda's creation.
It might have been uh and then uh, what was
I saying? Oh? Um, I don't feel like it came
down hard enough on on this Yahoo. What was the
guy's name? Zimbardo. Yeah, Zimbardo for just crafting a really
(02:37):
poor doing a very poor job at crafting its supposedly
scientific experiment. No, he was like the driving force behind
that movie getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get
a movie made in America. He seems to be a
pretty frameless self promoter decades. Yes, Yeah, it's not a
good quality in a social psychologist. No, so we're gonna see.
I guess we'll let the cat out of the bag.
(02:57):
But well, we shall see that. Um. The Stanford prison
experiment one of the most famous experiments in the Annals
of Psychology. It's not an experiment at all. It's it's
findings are wide open new interpretation, and it was conducted
(03:18):
by a showman. Basically. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's
a red flag when you don't publish your findings in
a medical journal. You published them in New York was
a New York magazine, New York Times magazine, Hodgeman's rag. Well,
great rag, But that's not the place to go publish
scientific findings. No peer of viewed journals are, and they
(03:40):
circumvented that, but for very good reasons. All right, so
let's let's talk about the outline. So let's go back
to the beginning, right, Yeah, back to the year of
my birth and Stanford at Stanford University, which is what
Palo Alto. Yeah, uh find being sequoia is what is there?
(04:02):
They have like a big old sequoia on their logo.
I think it's like a and then they have a
uh sequoia with its fists up. That's Notre Dame I'm
thinking of. I do feel like it has something. Chuck's
looking it up everybody, so let me stall. It is
a tree, the Stanford Tree. I don't know what the
mascot is, but there's definitely a tree associated. I looked
(04:25):
it up, the Stanford Tree. Okay. And the first question
is why is it a tree? Huh? Well, what's the answer. Well,
I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it
is in California, But that doesn't answer the real question,
which is why would you have a tree? Right Phillips
Embardo sitting there like quit stall and get to the
get to the heckling. He's still around, Yeah he is,
(04:48):
so um, all right, we're at Stanford. It's nine Yeah.
We're actually in the basement of one of the buildings
at Stanford, Stanford University. I think like Campbell Hall or
something like that. And I think August of nineteen seventy one,
there were um twenty four young men, almost all of
them one I think one of them was Asian American,
(05:08):
and um, they are doing something pretty bizarre in this
basement in August of They've been divided into two groups,
guards and prisoners supposedly average kids, right, and they are
um acting out this basically role playing game of guards
(05:31):
versus prisoners for fifteen bucks a day in a simulated
prison in the basement of this this hall at Stanford University. Yeah,
which would be about nine dollars today, funded by the
U S Office of Naval Research. Is that right? So
it would be ninety three bucks a day, and it
was originally gonna be two weeks. So I'm sure some
of these guys were like, hey, yeah, yeah, I mean
(05:52):
I kind of forgot what it was like to be
a college student that that would be, uh, you know
what between twelve and four bucks darting off your summer
it would be about dollars if my quick math is correct,
good scratch for year old. Yeah, two weeks on summer break,
(06:12):
that's right. So Uh, you were divided into two lots,
like you said. Um, they asked people, um, supposedly what
you wanted to be, unless this was purely a movie creation,
and they did try and look up and try and
find out the differences. Um, But they supposedly asked him.
In most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner. Uh.
(06:33):
In one of the reactions from who ended up being
the bad guard, the guy said, they asked him why,
and he's like, because nobody likes cards. It's like, why
would anyone want to be a guard? Because they thought
we'll just be prisoners, because they just will lay around
smoke cigarettes. So we'll we'll and we'll kind of unpack
what that suggests later on. Sure. Okay, so you've got
(06:55):
these these guys and they're down here for this experiment,
and so coming at it from the way. This is
the popular interpretation of what happened at the Stanford Prison experiment. Okay,
you've got you've got twelve guards and twelve prisoners. The
prisoners had been arrested, by the way, by the real
Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but like
(07:16):
the real cops came by arrested each one of them
for you know, a variety of crimes, booked them at
the Palo Alto Police station and then transported them to
the jail, the fake jail in uh at Stanford. Yeah,
they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did
a legit job. They put up signs, they had these
(07:37):
rooms decked out like jail cells, they had a whole um.
They did a really believable job of making this seem
like a prison environment at least so Um, you've got
these these prisoners who have been delivered, You've got these
guards who are waiting there for him, and um as
as far as Zimbardo has ever said, these these guards
(07:59):
were told you have to protect the prison and everything
else is up to you. The only rule is there's
no physical punishment. We're just here to observe, Like here's
your uniforms, here's your sunglasses. Yeah. And then the prisoners
were booked in with wearing smocks, no shoes, no underwear, Yeah,
(08:19):
naked under the smocks, chained at the ankles. And then
they wore like um, those stocking cap do rags, a
panty on their head to simulate to simulate they're having
their head shaved, right, Uh, and you know, this is
this the early seventies, so most of them had these
big afrozen long hair and stuff under these panties. Right, so, um,
(08:44):
this is like at first, everything's pretty normal. The guards
don't quite know what to do. They're a little timid.
The prisoners apparently relish this immediately and started like finding
where the guard's boundaries were, and they started to band together.
And there was actually, I think on day two, the
(09:06):
the the turnover from day one to two, there was
a prisoner riot. Yeah, I mean they m like you said,
they were sort of laughing at first, and I think
we didn't mention too and this is will end up
being very very problematic and the first sign that he
didn't do a good job. Zimbardo actually acted as the
superintendent of the prison, involved himself in his own experiment
(09:28):
and had one of it. He had some graduate assistants
that were assisting in the program. They acted as parole board,
and one of them was the warden that was yeah,
undergrad actually, well the warden Jaffee, his last name was Jaffee.
He was an undergrad at the time and actually he
had come up with the experiment on his own. Oh,
(09:49):
he was the guy, huh huh. And then um, Zimbardo
was like, this is a really good idea. Let's do
this for real. Imagine the press, right. So yeah, like
he said, it escalated pretty quickly. After kind of laughing
at first, these guards got into their roles, to say
the least, and um really kind of started being jerks
(10:09):
in quick order. And after the prisoners were like, hey,
this is kind of funny, like you're being you're not
being very cool, and they were you know, kind of
smacked down and and you know, made to do things
like push ups and jumping jacks and uh, they would
withhold food and eventually they would like take their beds
away from them and stuff like. It just got worse
and worse, and there was, I think, like you said,
(10:31):
on day two, a an uprising. They got together, threw
the cots off their beds and through the bed frames
against the door and wouldn't let them in. So there
was a prisoner riot. Yeah. That's pretty significant, right, um.
And what's equally significant is that the guards by the
second day started to show signs of like real cruelty
(10:55):
toward the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. Um,
they started engage aging and basically acts of torture like
waking them up randomly in the middle of the night,
making them get up, like you said, push ups, which
is interpreted as um physical punishment because again you couldn't
you couldn't hit them with the rubber hose, you couldn't
hit them with the baton, you couldn't punch them. But
(11:16):
if you make somebody to do a bunch of push ups,
that's physical punishment too. Yeah, and it was within the
bounds apparently. Yeah. They were referred to only by their
prison numbers. They would never say their names. They were
made to memorize everyone else's prison number, and like they
would line them up and tell them to repeat their
numbers for like an hour. If they didn't do it
fast enough and then in reverse order, uh, they would
(11:38):
get punishment. They would do the kind of the classic
moves of holding one responsible for the punishment of others. Yeah,
that's a that's a big one. Like if you didn't
make your bed good enough, then no one could go
to sleep. Stuff like that. The guards also innovated um
the carrots here there too. They actually made one cell
like a good cell, like they put a bed in
it with like betting. Um, if you were in that cell,
(12:01):
you were eligible for like good meals better than what
the other prisoners had. And there were room for three
inmates in there at a time, and so instilled this
sense of competition and and um skullduggery, I guess backstabbery
among the prisoners to curry favor with the guards, like
(12:21):
by informing on the other ones so that you could
get a chance to be in like the nice cell. Yeah.
And I think even before that, like when they went
to do the when they went to stage the uprising,
I don't think there were three rooms of three and
I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated
and one of the rooms did not. And uh, because
not all the guys, um, you know, not all the
(12:42):
prisoners like rebelled as much. Some of them just kind
of went along with it. Interestingly, some of the guards
did not descend into cruelty. They actually some of them
did like favors, went out of their way to be
nice to the prisoners. But in um the grabster who
wrote this article points out very significantly, they didn't stand
up to the cruel guards or officially object to their
(13:05):
their behavior. They went along with it. But then in
their own right, in their own way, they did what
they could to retain their humanity. So there are two
huge points and one of them, there's one among the
guards and one among the prisoners. And the one among
the prisoners comes thirty six hours after the beginning of
the of the experiment, and this prisoner, his name, it
(13:28):
would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpy. Um, he had
an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown thirty six hours after
this this this experiment starts, one of the prisoners, it
becomes so emotionally involved in this simulated prison at this cruelty,
the simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards that he had
(13:51):
a nervous breakdown and had to be had to be
removed from them the experiment. And this is like, this
is embardos. This is the official line for the Stanford
Prison experiment and has been for decades. Yeah. He also
said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash.
There was um all manner of of various levels of
(14:14):
psychological breakdowns happening on the other side. The big star
among the guards was a guy named John Wayne, who
you referenced earlier. Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman, and
he was the one who he was the ringleader. He's
the one that came out as the most brutal guard
of them all, and all the other guards kind of
fell in line behind him and took their cues from him.
(14:37):
So this whole thing is going on, This is crazy
town in this place. In in six days, six days,
this thing descends into chaos. Supposed to be two weeks, yes,
there was. There was rumors that there was going to
be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. Um.
There were that that guy Douglas Corpi, who had a
nervous breakdown, ended up getting put into the whole um
(15:00):
this broom closet for I think overnight and was finally
released because the the researchers that actually stepped in and said,
you shoulhould probably let him out. Um. It was. It
was just utter chaos. And then eventually um Phillip Zimbardo's
girlfriend at the time of a woman named Christine mass
(15:20):
Maslock his wife to be. Um. Oh she married him,
huh um. So she came and just dropped in to
see how things were going and was so outraged at
what she saw that she was like, you, you're so
far beyond the line. You have to stop this now,
like this is this is descended into chaos. You can't
do this. These people are treating these these prisoners horribly,
(15:44):
Like how are you letting this go on? Fine? And
so the next day he canceled the experiment again after
six days, and it was scheduled to go on for
two weeks. And so he comes out tells the world
in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you,
(16:04):
if I took you josh and I took you Chuck
and put you as guarden prisoner in an even a
simulated prison, and put a smock on josh and took
his underwear off and uh put a stocking on his head,
and gave Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would
beat Josh up, and Joshua probably have his spirit broken
(16:25):
and have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is
in everybody crumbling at the first sign of adversity. Isn't
everybody We're all just pathetic weaklings? Stanford Prison experiment and
he ran off and said, I'm famous. All right, that's
a great setup. So we'll take a break here and
come back and talk a little bit about the more
(16:46):
about the experiment and the realities of it right after this.
(17:10):
All right, So you've got John Wayne in there. I
don't think we mentioned that he took on the persona
of the prison boss and cool hand Luke. He did
a fake Southern accent and everything and dove right into
this role. Um, if you talk to Dave Eshelmann today,
he will say he's very much on record of saying,
I'm not some jerk, uh, And I didn't get off
(17:33):
on being sadistic. He said, I wanted to do what
they paid me fifteen dollars a day to do, which
was to be a prison guard and to treat these
guys poorly. And so I you know, he said, I
did some drama in high school, and I literally acted
this part as well as I could. That was I
felt was expected and wanted from me, right, And I
(17:55):
put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like
asked people friends and family today, they would laugh at
this because I'm really not this guy at all, right,
Because he really comes off as as a bit of
a villain in this movie. For sure. Well, he perpetrated
real cruelty on other people and we'll get to that later.
And he should because the other people actually did suffer
(18:18):
under this guy's leadership as the ringleader of the mean guards,
like they wore pink on Wednesday. It was terrible everywhere, right, So, um,
he really should feel bad, and apparently he does. I
saw that all over the place too, that he feels
bad for it. But the point is is that he
has said, like, this didn't happen organically, like I I wasn't.
(18:43):
I wasn't I felt encouraged to play this role. That's
a big deal because the findings of the Stanford prison
experiments say, if you take some people and say you're
a guard empower and you will turn evil, they will
turn evil within a day. A day they said about
this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was, just
like you said, doing my job. But they're paying me
(19:05):
fifteen bucks a day for Let's put that one to
the side. In that Let's go visit with Douglas Corpi,
who was the prisoner who in thirty six short hours
of this simulated prison experiment lost his marbles and had
a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right, one
of the other two pillars of the findings that people
(19:26):
are either evil or easily crumble in the face of
adversity from the Stanford prison experiment. And again, this is
how this thing has been taught for like fifty years. Okay, Yeah,
So Corpy comes out and says, I was faking that,
and I put on a big act so I could
get out of there because it sucked and I didn't
want to be there anymore. So I fake like I was.
(19:47):
And he he like one of his quotes was I
don't have it here, but basically said like any trained
clinician would have been able to see right through this.
Like when I hear the tapes years later, it's like,
I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently the John
Wayne guy at least had been in like high school
plays in college too, I think, yeah, And he was like,
I was not an actor. And it was so clear
(20:08):
to me looking back at these tapes that I was
faking it, faking a nervous breakdown, faking a nervous breakdown
to get out of there. So the reason why he
said later that he did fake this nervous breakdown is
because he took the job because he thought he'd just
be laying around, like you said, smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner,
and he would get to study for the g r E.
He was inner grad school and well they said, no,
(20:31):
you can't have your books. Now. They didn't give him anything,
and this guy was like, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute,
this is day one. He's like, whoa, whoa whoa, Like,
I need those books. I'm taking the g r E,
basically leaving here after two weeks and going to take
the test, like I've got to spend this two week studying.
They're like, you can't have your books. So he quickly
saw that the only way out was to fake this
(20:52):
nervous breakdown. And Billy crude Up went in there and said,
why is everyone saying whoa whoa whoa? Only I can
say whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. Uh yeah, so
we've kind of poo pooed the two major findings from
the study already. So that's that's a huge deal, right,
because again the idea is that if you put people
any random people, Remember these are just average like middle
(21:14):
middle class white kids, um, which is another problem. Right
if you put if you put any, well, that means
everybody that's the whole world. Right, If you put anybody
in the world in this situation, they're going to either
turn evil or lose their marbles. So, um, those are
the two findings. That's what everybody took it as at first.
It later came out, now this guy was acting. This
(21:37):
guy was faking. So what else do we have? Then, Well,
we have this idea that Zimbardo insinuated himself as part
of the experiment, and that actually created the findings from
the Standford prison experiment. So should we put a pin
in that. You want to talk about that now? No, No,
I want to go. I want to go where you
(21:57):
want to go. All right, let's put a pin in
that then and talk about a little bit more about
what went on that week. Um, they had everything from
visitation like you could write a letter to your family
or girlfriend or whoever you want to come visit you
to ask for visitation rights, and the family came in
and they did. They came in and visited for an
hour and they were in some cases parents were like
(22:20):
I don't know about this. This is like this just
seems like a really weird thing. And Zimbardo will be like,
oh no, it's totally fine, Like you know, they're the psychologists. Yeah,
like they want to be here, like ask them and
the the kids. You know, they did say that they
wanted to stay okay, which is which is important? Okay,
(22:42):
so what all? What else is importantess Like, no one
in the visiting hour. I don't think we're like, get
me out of here. They're like no, this is all
part of the part of the act. Essentially. Um, they
had parole hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow
they said that if they they could be released, if
they would forfeit the money. Uh. And this is after
(23:03):
I don't know how many of the six days. But um,
they could not get paid if and be paroled if
they went in front of the parole board. They went
in front of the parole board, some of them did,
and most of the prisoners said that they would give
up their money. In fact, and the parole members like, uh,
like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even
had one um former prisoner, this guy that like it
(23:27):
was a fifteen year yeah inmate, fifteen or seventeen year
inmate on the board that I guess him Zimbardo. I
want to call him Zamboni. So he actually was a
friend of Jaffi's, the guy who originally actually as an undergrad,
so he brought him in on it, right, So he
was on the parole board, and he was kind of
one of the ones, um at least in the film
(23:48):
version that was kind of saying like, no, this is
like how it is, like, you should keep it going.
But I don't know how much of that was dramatized.
I don't either. That's a that's a That's one of
the problems with this is, you know, so much of
the documentation has been not released over the years, and
when it does get released, it contradicts the official line.
And um, it's very tough to separate truth from fiction,
(24:10):
especially when you introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing,
just to just to drive those nails in the coffin too. Yeah,
and so reality in fact, there's been a lot of
in the years since, a lot of complaints that a
lot of these you know, kids were screaming, I want
to go home, I want to go home. And for
his part, Zimbardo said, in the contract it says I
(24:31):
want to exit the experiment, as the official line to say,
and they could have gone home and he was like,
but you hear no one ever said I want to
exit the experiment. They would say I want my mommy,
or I'm going crazy, or my god, please stop this,
please stop this, but they never said those exact words,
this safe phrase. Let's say, yeah, the safe phrase. But
(24:51):
it turns out that's bunk to right. Yeah, it turns
out that if you look at the contract that they
had that he's referencing that that say the rules and
everything in the emit there's no safe word to be mentioned.
Certainly doesn't say if you say I want to quit
the experiment, you get released from the experiment. So he's
just flat out lying about that. Then that's from what
I understand. Yes, and what article was this that you sent?
(25:14):
There's a really good takedown um in medium called the
The Lifespan of a Lie um and it's based on
that titles based on a I think a documentary by
a documentary or book by a French filmmaker um which
(25:34):
who titled his version The Birth of a Lie and
it's basically about how the Stanford prison experiment was just
basically it was bunked from the get go, which will
kind of pick that apart in a little bit, and
that it's just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again, basically
fifty years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just
(25:56):
stayed like an infection. All Right. Some other things that
happened to make it realistic. They brought in, um, a
lawyer when parents asked for one, and played along like
it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came
in to speak to prisoners. Uh, and he played along
with it too. Uh. They basically did everything that you
(26:18):
would think would happen in a real prison um on
on a slightly scaled down level. Right, But the upshot
of all of this is Zimbardo saying, like, do you
see what's going on here? Everybody? Like I just put
some guys in, like nine guys in at a time,
or twelve guys as guards, twelve guys as prisoners, and
their parents came for visiting hours, a lawyer came. That's
(26:43):
the that's how real the simulated prison became in people's minds.
Just imagine what a real prisons like, right. So um
and he was saying they could have left at any
time if they just said the safe word, and no
one ever said the safe word. There is some evidence
that these people were basically kept there against their will,
especially after Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and
(27:08):
then was thrown into broom closet and retaliation for it.
Um that he should have very very clearly should have
been left or allowed to leave. And to even be
led to think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently
the idea that spread throughout the prisoners. Um, that would
be like keeping someone against their will. Yeah, and he
(27:30):
did leave, but was supposed to agree to come back, supposedly,
uh to like play a different role as a prisoner
who like maybe escaped and came back I think, but
didn't come back, right, And um, I think five people
were released early before the whole experiment was called off,
all prisoners. No guards left the experiment, which is telling well,
(27:53):
and they were working in shifts that which is important. Okay,
that is a big one too. Um. But but if
you consider that no one asked to be a guard,
they all has to be prisoners. But then none of
the guards left the experiment, that's to me, that's interesting
on its face, right, there's something to that, but um,
they're the whole thing just kind of falling apart after
(28:15):
Zimbardo's girlfriend Um at the time, came um the idea
that up to this point, these people had engaged in
this fantasy and thought that they couldn't leave when they
really could. That's controversial in and of itself, because again
there's evidence that they were led to believe they couldn't leave,
(28:35):
and that's different. That changes things entirely. So you want
to take another break and then pick this part some more. Yeah,
let's do it. Kind of fun alright, the final takedown.
(29:09):
I'm I'm waiting for I'm waiting for Phillipsimbardo to release
a book about like our Jackhammer episode. That's fine, I
would read it, all right, So where are we here? Basically,
we're at the point where uh he is he has
into the experiment and now we're dealing with the fallout
since nine and how this should be viewed. One of
(29:31):
the big things that came out of that French book,
The Birth of a Lie, is the um the filmmaker
unearthed a recording that was I don't know where he
found it, but they he found it and released the
transcript of it that clearly has Um, if not Zimbardo
(29:52):
at least Jaffee. Definitely Jaffee coaching the um the guards
to be more brutal, Right, be a tough guard. Just
think of like how the pigs do it, and do
it like that, I think is what the quote was, right, Yeah,
when the whole idea of this thing is to try
and prove that without any influence, Yes, this is what happens. Right,
(30:12):
So there's a couple of things that happened method Methodologically,
there's a lot of things that happened the moment they
started coaching those guards. Number one, they took any organic
nous out of their behavior. They were then doing what
they thought they were expected to do, like John Wayne
for sure, who just went over the top is what
it was, um. And then number two, they made them
(30:33):
co experimenters. Like the whole thing was supposed to be
guards and prisoners, and we're going to watch as test
subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards, you're
their co experimenters. Now, now the experiments entirely on the
on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well then
those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out when
you base the whole thing on a guy who is
(30:54):
faking right. But but you you make the guards co
experimenters and you just completely take out any objectivity from
this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology. Well, and
the fact we already mentioned that one of one of
the researchers was a warden and zim uh keep on
to call m Zambrano. That's fine. Zimbardo Zamboni himself was
(31:17):
the superintendent, like the minute he decided to do that,
Like I looked up. I think he's like in his
late thirties when he did this. How did he not like,
was he that bad and doing his job? How did
he not know? Like, wait a minute, this will taint
the experiment. Do you want to talk about why the
people think that he was so? Yeah, okay, so he
(31:38):
was a uh he wasn't. I think still is a
social activist for sure, And he had decided, um, and
I can't really disagree with them that prisons were brutal
places where brutality lived, and that they were inherently brutal.
And so if you take somebody and put them into
this place, you're doing a real disservice to humanity by
(31:58):
by throwing somebody in a bruutal place that you know,
is brutal. His aim was to get reformed to happen. Yes,
from the outset. Well, I mean, I can't fault that,
but you can't call it a scientific experiment either. And
it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one interpretation of
his findings is that it's all or nothing with prisons.
(32:20):
Prisons are inherently brutal, or you can't have them. So
either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons, or
you have no prisons. And so, faced with that choice
and with rising crime rates in the seventies, um a
lot of people double down on getting tough and made
prisons even worse and built more prisons and said, t yes,
we're not even gonna try to like reform you anymore,
(32:43):
but we're just gonna send you to these brutal places
that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do
about it. So it would have it would have backfired
in that sense, but in in in the idea that
he was doing something with the best interests of his
fellow people at heart. Again, like you said, it's it's
tough to fault him for that. He just really really
(33:04):
gave social psychology a black eye. Yeah. So one of
the other things he did wrong, UM, and this one
I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have
a control group and one of his Um, this guy
wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came
by one day and was like, you know what, what's
your control what's your independent variable? Yeah, and he was
(33:26):
like what, Yeah, He's like, I don't have one. So
if you if you run a an experiment of any sort,
um grabstre uses a great analogy where if you're trying
to figure out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes,
you pick a bunch of tomatoes, you weigh them, you
check them for color, um, you make sure that they're
identical to another set of tomatoes. So you have two
(33:49):
sets of basically identical tomatoes. One you radiate, one you
do not, and after a set amount of time you
go back and see what the differences are. And then
you can say probably that when you read the eight tomatoes,
these are the effects, and the effects are the differences
between the two. Same thing with the prison experiment, what
would you have here two different cell blocks and one
(34:10):
that literally isn't coached and completely left alone. That's what
I would have done for sure. And then one where
you're saying, hey, be brutal, and yeah, we'll see if
everyone falls into these roles exactly that that would have
been great. And actually some researchers in two thousand one
they did exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with
just that control group you suggested. Um, it was called
(34:31):
the BBC Prison Study. Yeah, has Lem and Riker. Yeah,
and basically they did the same thing. They they they
did not do any coaching, they didn't do any intervention.
They did the the thing exactly like you're supposed to,
or like Zimbardo should have from the outset. And um,
they found that again they made the control group to
the original Stanford prison experiment, they found that the exact
(34:54):
opposite happened. The prisoners stayed banded together, the guards were
totally in disarray, um and disorganized. The brutality never emerged. Um,
and there wasn't any violence from what I understand. And
this is where it gets really scummy. If he asked me.
Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Hasselman Reicher said
(35:14):
they discovered he was privately writing editors, uh to keep
them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent. Yeah,
in the journal that they they released their findings, and
he wrote in an appendage to their their article and said,
these are they just don't even listen to these guys.
I'm Philip Simbardo. Man. So yeah, I thought that was
(35:37):
pretty scummy too if he did that. Um, so you've
got methodologically, there's even more problems too. If in the
in the original newspaper advertisement, chuck, he said, um, prison experiment,
prison experiment. Everybody sign up. Yeah, that was a problem
in itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing, no,
exactly until they showed up, right, So you're gonna get
(35:58):
a big, wide swath of people, and then once they
find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say no
thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting um. A
two thousand and seven follow up study found narcissistic, hostile,
overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey or the opposite. Well,
(36:21):
that seems to be the case in this case, yeah,
which was in fact, one of them was a liberal
activist who kind of purposely went in there because he
thought maybe these findings could be used one day for
prison reform. Well, I think also most of the UM
what I got from Jaffee coaching the people to say, like,
think about what the pigs would do, and then do
(36:41):
do that, because we really got to show them how
how brutal prisons are. Um. I think everybody who showed
up basically was against prisons. But whether you're against prisons
or forum, you were automatically tainted before you even showed
up for the interview because they wrote prison experiment in
the ad. So from the outset there was biased, There
(37:03):
was no control group. It attracted a bias cross section
of people participated. He was a participant, and that actually
chuck led to the second set of findings that Zimbardo
had influenced this and become a participant himself. And here's
(37:23):
the current interpretation of all of it. Okay, this seems
to be the current dujur interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment.
Not that people are inherently cruel and inherently will just
crumble in the face of authority, although that that might
still stand, but that people will be are capable of
(37:45):
cruelty if they're recruited by an authority. Figure the second set,
and there's actually been three sets of interpretations. The second
set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually
demonstrated what's called situation fist theory. Yeah, and that's basically
that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior. Right,
(38:07):
So the point was not that people are inherently cruel
on an individual level, but the situation that they're put in,
they will quickly find those roles if there's a power
structure above them, that is, that has normalized this and
is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this really
tied in with you know, this is one people were
(38:29):
still really trying to figure out what the heck had
just happened with the Nazis. It was only like years before.
So this idea that this banality of evil, this made
perfect sense in that in that respect, right, there is
a bureaucracy that had normalized evil and you were just
following orders. That was the second interpretation of the Stanford
(38:51):
prison experiment. Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but
everything like the Vietnam War, which was I mean, this
is one, and like the Myley massacre, and you know,
I was just following orders like this tied in this
has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics of
the day. Right, So, um, apparently it also tied in
(39:12):
really well to Attica, and Zimbardo must have just couldn't
believe is his good fortune that there was a there's
alotiest prison riot in American history happened like a couple
of weeks after he made the news in the New
York Times magazine with this journal art or this article
that he wrote, right, But that actually played into it too,
because apparently, following orders, a lot of guards just fired
(39:34):
blindly into the tear gas smoke of this prison riot
and killed tons of of unarmed prisoners and hostages. So
so Zimbard is like, Okay, that's fine, however we're going
to interpret this. I'm cool with that. But the third one,
I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with
the current one, which is bad science, I think. So
(39:57):
what I saw is that a lot of social psychologists
we've known this is bad science all along, but the
findings were really interesting and worthwhile, so we didn't throw
the baby out with the bathwater. The third one is
that that Zimbardo inserted himself and what this, what this
this study really showed was that people will engage in
(40:19):
acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority
recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause.
And in this case it was Zimbardo making the guards
co experiment ers by coaching them to be cruel and
in in the name of prison reform. Ultimately, when they
showed the world what happens when you put normal people
(40:41):
in a prison situation. Yeah, which is what the John
Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then,
is that this is what they I thought they wanted
was for me to be a bad guard so we
could prove, uh, ultimately that prisons need reform. And that
that is why he's still complicit, because he's still engaged
in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners in
(41:04):
the study. And that's why he should still feel bad
and still does feel bad. But he did it because
he was recruited in the name of this rights is
caused by somebody who was in authority. So is this
being taught this way in classes now? I don't I
think that they, especially once it came out the Zimbardo
and at the very least his warden co experiment er
(41:24):
was was coaching them to do this and that the
organic cruelty is just totally out the window. I think
they don't know what to do with it right now.
They're trying to figure out like how to get these
findings across or what to make of them. Because one
one of these quotes from the article you sent the
guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the
typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's
(41:46):
typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, uh, not an experiment.
And there's a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's
almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example have
how to not do a study correctly, which is interesting.
Oh yeah, I mean methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about
(42:09):
the findings later on, or misinterpreting the results or using spin.
It's yeah, there's a lot here. But it was approved
by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time.
Those were Zimbardo's experiments. We presented this too, uh And
there you know, he still says that it was ethical. Well,
it was at the time under the guidelines, it was ethical,
(42:31):
but then after they changed the guidelines, you couldn't do
this today, or at least not with like he did it. So,
I did you remember the very brief psychology is nuts serious?
Watch that I did win on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah,
I watched that today, did you What do you think
it was good? Thanks? Man? Cute little background? Yeah, I
thought so too. Um and let's see you got anything else? No,
(42:55):
I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but
we were. This is like vaping love all scathing. This
is way worse than vaporing. I'm sure the vapors are
like going. They were really hard on that guy. Yeah.
The movie, uh, you know, the documentary is probably a
little more accurate. But the movie wasn't bad. I mean
it's not great, Yeah, but it was okay. It felt
(43:16):
like a movie the week it's an airplane movie. Yeah,
watch it on your next poine. That my recommendation, Thanks buddy. Well,
if you want to know more about the Stanford Prison Experiment, um,
type those words in the search part how stuff works
dot comm and it will bring up this grab store article.
Since I said grab store, it's time for listener mail.
(43:37):
I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, it's spent
in the last two years fixing up the yard. Uh
in our house. Uh in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Oh, that
sounds like a pleasant place. Yeah it is. My husband
actually introducing your show a few years back, and thank
god he did, because I've literally listened to you for
hours and hours while working in the yard. It was
a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule
(43:59):
the he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of
the responsibility, although he did a lot of heavy looking.
To enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself
to listen to to it any other time. You were
only allowed during yard work. This made me much more
ready to get outside and get into it. You guys
were with me while I carried literally tons of red
stone uphill and buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing,
(44:21):
planted uh pecky sandra ferns and hostas, and the rocky
soil I've ever had to work with, and just clearing
away over growth which it sounds like Tanya Harding training
for the Olympics, and that one that one montage, which
it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy.
During it all, I learned about tiny adorable little creature
called it's heart degrade, the business of head transplants, the
(44:44):
hookworm her favorite episode, and some haunting information I cannot
and hear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and
drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information. Even
when I think it's boring, you make it fun. There
were times you had me l o l ng in
my back ard alone and covered in dirt and sweat
like a crazy person. Attached her some pictures of the progress,
(45:06):
all from your climate controlled studio, that is from Sharon Prashynski.
And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one
beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure, it is lovely.
It is nice work. We're glad we could be there
with you to help you get up that hill. Yeah,
and down the hill and then back up the hill
and back down the hill. That's right, and then back
(45:28):
up again. Uh. If you want to get in touch
with us to let us know how we've helped you out,
we love hearing that kind of stuff. If you're Phillip Lombardo,
we expect to hear from your lawyer. Um. And in
the meantime you can hang out with us at our
home on the web. Stuff you should Know dot com,
where you can find all of our social links, and
you can also send us an email to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(45:53):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com
Hey, everyone, We're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix,
Arizona this fall. Yeah, October, we're going to be at
Salt Lake Cities Grand Theater and then the next night
October will be in Phoenix. And we added a second
show to our Melbourne show, right, that's right, a second
earlier show in Melbourne. So you can get all the
information for all of these shows at s y s
(00:22):
K live dot com. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant, Jerry's over there. So why don't you pull
(00:42):
up a chair, kick back and tell us about your problems?
Because this is psychology stuff. We should just call this
episode the Stanford Prison Experiment a k a. Perhaps the
happiest experiment of all time, and it's really not an
experiment anyway, but it's the most famous psychology experiment ever. Yeah.
(01:07):
I got kind of ticked off while I was researching this,
you should, man, because I used to think it was cool, like,
oh man, what a cool experiment. Yeah, everybody's evil and
it's core. Yeah. Then I researched it, and I was like,
this is a bunch of bs, all of it. This
is one of the worst executed experiments I've ever heard of.
That is so funny because I while I was researching this,
I was like, I'm gonna have to keep it together.
(01:29):
Maybe at the end I can really go off from
let's go off at the beginning. That's great. Man. I
watched the movie today to yeah, how was it? How
was Billy crude up? Because I loved him in almost
famous Well, I'm a fan, he's he was good. Um,
But like, I don't know, the movie A was pretty
sensationalized as far as the violence. Like they showed a
(01:52):
lot of straight up physical violence in the movie which
supposedly didn't occur, um, like beating them with billy clubs
and hog tying them in like like real violence. How actually,
these days I should say at Lanta, Yeah, Uh, y'allywood
is what they call it. Oh, there you go. Perfect,
(02:14):
That's that's perfect. That sounds like a Norman Reda's creation.
It might have been uh and then uh, what was
I saying? Oh? Um, I don't feel like it came
down hard enough on on this Yahoo. What was the
guy's name? Zimbardo. Yeah, Zimbardo for just crafting a really
(02:37):
poor doing a very poor job at crafting its supposedly
scientific experiment. No, he was like the driving force behind
that movie getting made. Apparently he'd been trying to get
a movie made in America. He seems to be a
pretty frameless self promoter decades. Yes, Yeah, it's not a
good quality in a social psychologist. No, so we're gonna see.
I guess we'll let the cat out of the bag.
(02:57):
But well, we shall see that. Um. The Stanford prison
experiment one of the most famous experiments in the Annals
of Psychology. It's not an experiment at all. It's it's
findings are wide open new interpretation, and it was conducted
(03:18):
by a showman. Basically. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's
a red flag when you don't publish your findings in
a medical journal. You published them in New York was
a New York magazine, New York Times magazine, Hodgeman's rag. Well,
great rag, But that's not the place to go publish
scientific findings. No peer of viewed journals are, and they
(03:40):
circumvented that, but for very good reasons. All right, so
let's let's talk about the outline. So let's go back
to the beginning, right, Yeah, back to the year of
my birth and Stanford at Stanford University, which is what
Palo Alto. Yeah, uh find being sequoia is what is there?
(04:02):
They have like a big old sequoia on their logo.
I think it's like a and then they have a
uh sequoia with its fists up. That's Notre Dame I'm
thinking of. I do feel like it has something. Chuck's
looking it up everybody, so let me stall. It is
a tree, the Stanford Tree. I don't know what the
mascot is, but there's definitely a tree associated. I looked
(04:25):
it up, the Stanford Tree. Okay. And the first question
is why is it a tree? Huh? Well, what's the answer. Well,
I mean, I'm sure it's just because of where it
is in California, But that doesn't answer the real question,
which is why would you have a tree? Right Phillips
Embardo sitting there like quit stall and get to the
get to the heckling. He's still around, Yeah he is,
(04:48):
so um, all right, we're at Stanford. It's nine Yeah.
We're actually in the basement of one of the buildings
at Stanford, Stanford University. I think like Campbell Hall or
something like that. And I think August of nineteen seventy one,
there were um twenty four young men, almost all of
them one I think one of them was Asian American,
(05:08):
and um, they are doing something pretty bizarre in this
basement in August of They've been divided into two groups,
guards and prisoners supposedly average kids, right, and they are
um acting out this basically role playing game of guards
(05:31):
versus prisoners for fifteen bucks a day in a simulated
prison in the basement of this this hall at Stanford University. Yeah,
which would be about nine dollars today, funded by the
U S Office of Naval Research. Is that right? So
it would be ninety three bucks a day, and it
was originally gonna be two weeks. So I'm sure some
of these guys were like, hey, yeah, yeah, I mean
(05:52):
I kind of forgot what it was like to be
a college student that that would be, uh, you know
what between twelve and four bucks darting off your summer
it would be about dollars if my quick math is correct,
good scratch for year old. Yeah, two weeks on summer break,
(06:12):
that's right. So Uh, you were divided into two lots,
like you said. Um, they asked people, um, supposedly what
you wanted to be, unless this was purely a movie creation,
and they did try and look up and try and
find out the differences. Um, But they supposedly asked him.
In most everyone said, or in fact everyone said prisoner. Uh.
(06:33):
In one of the reactions from who ended up being
the bad guard, the guy said, they asked him why,
and he's like, because nobody likes cards. It's like, why
would anyone want to be a guard? Because they thought
we'll just be prisoners, because they just will lay around
smoke cigarettes. So we'll we'll and we'll kind of unpack
what that suggests later on. Sure. Okay, so you've got
(06:55):
these these guys and they're down here for this experiment,
and so coming at it from the way. This is
the popular interpretation of what happened at the Stanford Prison experiment. Okay,
you've got you've got twelve guards and twelve prisoners. The
prisoners had been arrested, by the way, by the real
Palo Alto police. Yeah, they weren't told when, but like
(07:16):
the real cops came by arrested each one of them
for you know, a variety of crimes, booked them at
the Palo Alto Police station and then transported them to
the jail, the fake jail in uh at Stanford. Yeah,
they call it the Stanford County Jail. And they did
a legit job. They put up signs, they had these
(07:37):
rooms decked out like jail cells, they had a whole um.
They did a really believable job of making this seem
like a prison environment at least so Um, you've got
these these prisoners who have been delivered, You've got these
guards who are waiting there for him, and um as
as far as Zimbardo has ever said, these these guards
(07:59):
were told you have to protect the prison and everything
else is up to you. The only rule is there's
no physical punishment. We're just here to observe, Like here's
your uniforms, here's your sunglasses. Yeah. And then the prisoners
were booked in with wearing smocks, no shoes, no underwear, Yeah,
(08:19):
naked under the smocks, chained at the ankles. And then
they wore like um, those stocking cap do rags, a
panty on their head to simulate to simulate they're having
their head shaved, right, Uh, and you know, this is
this the early seventies, so most of them had these
big afrozen long hair and stuff under these panties. Right, so, um,
(08:44):
this is like at first, everything's pretty normal. The guards
don't quite know what to do. They're a little timid.
The prisoners apparently relish this immediately and started like finding
where the guard's boundaries were, and they started to band together.
And there was actually, I think on day two, the
(09:06):
the the turnover from day one to two, there was
a prisoner riot. Yeah, I mean they m like you said,
they were sort of laughing at first, and I think
we didn't mention too and this is will end up
being very very problematic and the first sign that he
didn't do a good job. Zimbardo actually acted as the
superintendent of the prison, involved himself in his own experiment
(09:28):
and had one of it. He had some graduate assistants
that were assisting in the program. They acted as parole board,
and one of them was the warden that was yeah,
undergrad actually, well the warden Jaffee, his last name was Jaffee.
He was an undergrad at the time and actually he
had come up with the experiment on his own. Oh,
(09:49):
he was the guy, huh huh. And then um, Zimbardo
was like, this is a really good idea. Let's do
this for real. Imagine the press, right. So yeah, like
he said, it escalated pretty quickly. After kind of laughing
at first, these guards got into their roles, to say
the least, and um really kind of started being jerks
(10:09):
in quick order. And after the prisoners were like, hey,
this is kind of funny, like you're being you're not
being very cool, and they were you know, kind of
smacked down and and you know, made to do things
like push ups and jumping jacks and uh, they would
withhold food and eventually they would like take their beds
away from them and stuff like. It just got worse
and worse, and there was, I think, like you said,
(10:31):
on day two, a an uprising. They got together, threw
the cots off their beds and through the bed frames
against the door and wouldn't let them in. So there
was a prisoner riot. Yeah. That's pretty significant, right, um.
And what's equally significant is that the guards by the
second day started to show signs of like real cruelty
(10:55):
toward the prisoners. They started treating them very poorly. Um,
they started engage aging and basically acts of torture like
waking them up randomly in the middle of the night,
making them get up, like you said, push ups, which
is interpreted as um physical punishment because again you couldn't
you couldn't hit them with the rubber hose, you couldn't
hit them with the baton, you couldn't punch them. But
(11:16):
if you make somebody to do a bunch of push ups,
that's physical punishment too. Yeah, and it was within the
bounds apparently. Yeah. They were referred to only by their
prison numbers. They would never say their names. They were
made to memorize everyone else's prison number, and like they
would line them up and tell them to repeat their
numbers for like an hour. If they didn't do it
fast enough and then in reverse order, uh, they would
(11:38):
get punishment. They would do the kind of the classic
moves of holding one responsible for the punishment of others. Yeah,
that's a that's a big one. Like if you didn't
make your bed good enough, then no one could go
to sleep. Stuff like that. The guards also innovated um
the carrots here there too. They actually made one cell
like a good cell, like they put a bed in
it with like betting. Um, if you were in that cell,
(12:01):
you were eligible for like good meals better than what
the other prisoners had. And there were room for three
inmates in there at a time, and so instilled this
sense of competition and and um skullduggery, I guess backstabbery
among the prisoners to curry favor with the guards, like
(12:21):
by informing on the other ones so that you could
get a chance to be in like the nice cell. Yeah.
And I think even before that, like when they went
to do the when they went to stage the uprising,
I don't think there were three rooms of three and
I think six of them. Two of the rooms participated
and one of the rooms did not. And uh, because
not all the guys, um, you know, not all the
(12:42):
prisoners like rebelled as much. Some of them just kind
of went along with it. Interestingly, some of the guards
did not descend into cruelty. They actually some of them
did like favors, went out of their way to be
nice to the prisoners. But in um the grabster who
wrote this article points out very significantly, they didn't stand
up to the cruel guards or officially object to their
(13:05):
their behavior. They went along with it. But then in
their own right, in their own way, they did what
they could to retain their humanity. So there are two
huge points and one of them, there's one among the
guards and one among the prisoners. And the one among
the prisoners comes thirty six hours after the beginning of
the of the experiment, and this prisoner, his name, it
(13:28):
would later be revealed, was Douglas Corpy. Um, he had
an emotional breakdown, a nervous breakdown thirty six hours after
this this this experiment starts, one of the prisoners, it
becomes so emotionally involved in this simulated prison at this cruelty,
the simulated supposedly cruelty of the guards that he had
(13:51):
a nervous breakdown and had to be had to be
removed from them the experiment. And this is like, this
is embardos. This is the official line for the Stanford
Prison experiment and has been for decades. Yeah. He also
said that one of them broke out in a psychosomatic rash.
There was um all manner of of various levels of
(14:14):
psychological breakdowns happening on the other side. The big star
among the guards was a guy named John Wayne, who
you referenced earlier. Yeah, his name was Dave Eshelman, and
he was the one who he was the ringleader. He's
the one that came out as the most brutal guard
of them all, and all the other guards kind of
fell in line behind him and took their cues from him.
(14:37):
So this whole thing is going on, This is crazy
town in this place. In in six days, six days,
this thing descends into chaos. Supposed to be two weeks, yes,
there was. There was rumors that there was going to
be a breakout, and so they moved the experiment. Um.
There were that that guy Douglas Corpi, who had a
nervous breakdown, ended up getting put into the whole um
(15:00):
this broom closet for I think overnight and was finally
released because the the researchers that actually stepped in and said,
you shoulhould probably let him out. Um. It was. It
was just utter chaos. And then eventually um Phillip Zimbardo's
girlfriend at the time of a woman named Christine mass
(15:20):
Maslock his wife to be. Um. Oh she married him,
huh um. So she came and just dropped in to
see how things were going and was so outraged at
what she saw that she was like, you, you're so
far beyond the line. You have to stop this now,
like this is this is descended into chaos. You can't
do this. These people are treating these these prisoners horribly,
(15:44):
Like how are you letting this go on? Fine? And
so the next day he canceled the experiment again after
six days, and it was scheduled to go on for
two weeks. And so he comes out tells the world
in this New York Times magazine, guys, if I took you,
(16:04):
if I took you josh and I took you Chuck
and put you as guarden prisoner in an even a
simulated prison, and put a smock on josh and took
his underwear off and uh put a stocking on his head,
and gave Chuck a baton and some glasses. Chuck would
beat Josh up, and Joshua probably have his spirit broken
(16:25):
and have a nervous breakdown. It's in everybody. Evil is
in everybody crumbling at the first sign of adversity. Isn't
everybody We're all just pathetic weaklings? Stanford Prison experiment and
he ran off and said, I'm famous. All right, that's
a great setup. So we'll take a break here and
come back and talk a little bit about the more
(16:46):
about the experiment and the realities of it right after this.
(17:10):
All right, So you've got John Wayne in there. I
don't think we mentioned that he took on the persona
of the prison boss and cool hand Luke. He did
a fake Southern accent and everything and dove right into
this role. Um, if you talk to Dave Eshelmann today,
he will say he's very much on record of saying,
I'm not some jerk, uh, And I didn't get off
(17:33):
on being sadistic. He said, I wanted to do what
they paid me fifteen dollars a day to do, which
was to be a prison guard and to treat these
guys poorly. And so I you know, he said, I
did some drama in high school, and I literally acted
this part as well as I could. That was I
felt was expected and wanted from me, right, And I
(17:55):
put on this fake Southern accent. And if you like
asked people friends and family today, they would laugh at
this because I'm really not this guy at all, right,
Because he really comes off as as a bit of
a villain in this movie. For sure. Well, he perpetrated
real cruelty on other people and we'll get to that later.
And he should because the other people actually did suffer
(18:18):
under this guy's leadership as the ringleader of the mean guards,
like they wore pink on Wednesday. It was terrible everywhere, right, So, um,
he really should feel bad, and apparently he does. I
saw that all over the place too, that he feels
bad for it. But the point is is that he
has said, like, this didn't happen organically, like I I wasn't.
(18:43):
I wasn't I felt encouraged to play this role. That's
a big deal because the findings of the Stanford prison
experiments say, if you take some people and say you're
a guard empower and you will turn evil, they will
turn evil within a day. A day they said about
this guy. And this guy's like, no, I was, just
like you said, doing my job. But they're paying me
(19:05):
fifteen bucks a day for Let's put that one to
the side. In that Let's go visit with Douglas Corpi,
who was the prisoner who in thirty six short hours
of this simulated prison experiment lost his marbles and had
a nervous breakdown and had to go home. Right, one
of the other two pillars of the findings that people
(19:26):
are either evil or easily crumble in the face of
adversity from the Stanford prison experiment. And again, this is
how this thing has been taught for like fifty years. Okay, Yeah,
So Corpy comes out and says, I was faking that,
and I put on a big act so I could
get out of there because it sucked and I didn't
want to be there anymore. So I fake like I was.
(19:47):
And he he like one of his quotes was I
don't have it here, but basically said like any trained
clinician would have been able to see right through this.
Like when I hear the tapes years later, it's like,
I'm not an actor. I wasn't like apparently the John
Wayne guy at least had been in like high school
plays in college too, I think, yeah, And he was like,
I was not an actor. And it was so clear
(20:08):
to me looking back at these tapes that I was
faking it, faking a nervous breakdown, faking a nervous breakdown
to get out of there. So the reason why he
said later that he did fake this nervous breakdown is
because he took the job because he thought he'd just
be laying around, like you said, smoking cigarettes, being a prisoner,
and he would get to study for the g r E.
He was inner grad school and well they said, no,
(20:31):
you can't have your books. Now. They didn't give him anything,
and this guy was like, whoa, whoa, Wait a minute,
this is day one. He's like, whoa, whoa whoa, Like,
I need those books. I'm taking the g r E,
basically leaving here after two weeks and going to take
the test, like I've got to spend this two week studying.
They're like, you can't have your books. So he quickly
saw that the only way out was to fake this
(20:52):
nervous breakdown. And Billy crude Up went in there and said,
why is everyone saying whoa whoa whoa? Only I can
say whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. Uh yeah, so
we've kind of poo pooed the two major findings from
the study already. So that's that's a huge deal, right,
because again the idea is that if you put people
any random people, Remember these are just average like middle
(21:14):
middle class white kids, um, which is another problem. Right
if you put if you put any, well, that means
everybody that's the whole world. Right, If you put anybody
in the world in this situation, they're going to either
turn evil or lose their marbles. So, um, those are
the two findings. That's what everybody took it as at first.
It later came out, now this guy was acting. This
(21:37):
guy was faking. So what else do we have? Then, Well,
we have this idea that Zimbardo insinuated himself as part
of the experiment, and that actually created the findings from
the Standford prison experiment. So should we put a pin
in that. You want to talk about that now? No, No,
I want to go. I want to go where you
(21:57):
want to go. All right, let's put a pin in
that then and talk about a little bit more about
what went on that week. Um, they had everything from
visitation like you could write a letter to your family
or girlfriend or whoever you want to come visit you
to ask for visitation rights, and the family came in
and they did. They came in and visited for an
hour and they were in some cases parents were like
(22:20):
I don't know about this. This is like this just
seems like a really weird thing. And Zimbardo will be like,
oh no, it's totally fine, Like you know, they're the psychologists. Yeah,
like they want to be here, like ask them and
the the kids. You know, they did say that they
wanted to stay okay, which is which is important? Okay,
(22:42):
so what all? What else is importantess Like, no one
in the visiting hour. I don't think we're like, get
me out of here. They're like no, this is all
part of the part of the act. Essentially. Um, they
had parole hearings inside the course of a week. Somehow
they said that if they they could be released, if
they would forfeit the money. Uh. And this is after
(23:03):
I don't know how many of the six days. But um,
they could not get paid if and be paroled if
they went in front of the parole board. They went
in front of the parole board, some of them did,
and most of the prisoners said that they would give
up their money. In fact, and the parole members like, uh,
like I said, they were the graduate assistants. They even
had one um former prisoner, this guy that like it
(23:27):
was a fifteen year yeah inmate, fifteen or seventeen year
inmate on the board that I guess him Zimbardo. I
want to call him Zamboni. So he actually was a
friend of Jaffi's, the guy who originally actually as an undergrad,
so he brought him in on it, right, So he
was on the parole board, and he was kind of
one of the ones, um at least in the film
(23:48):
version that was kind of saying like, no, this is
like how it is, like, you should keep it going.
But I don't know how much of that was dramatized.
I don't either. That's a that's a That's one of
the problems with this is, you know, so much of
the documentation has been not released over the years, and
when it does get released, it contradicts the official line.
And um, it's very tough to separate truth from fiction,
(24:10):
especially when you introduce a Hollywood movie into the whole thing,
just to just to drive those nails in the coffin too. Yeah,
and so reality in fact, there's been a lot of
in the years since, a lot of complaints that a
lot of these you know, kids were screaming, I want
to go home, I want to go home. And for
his part, Zimbardo said, in the contract it says I
(24:31):
want to exit the experiment, as the official line to say,
and they could have gone home and he was like,
but you hear no one ever said I want to
exit the experiment. They would say I want my mommy,
or I'm going crazy, or my god, please stop this,
please stop this, but they never said those exact words,
this safe phrase. Let's say, yeah, the safe phrase. But
(24:51):
it turns out that's bunk to right. Yeah, it turns
out that if you look at the contract that they
had that he's referencing that that say the rules and
everything in the emit there's no safe word to be mentioned.
Certainly doesn't say if you say I want to quit
the experiment, you get released from the experiment. So he's
just flat out lying about that. Then that's from what
I understand. Yes, and what article was this that you sent?
(25:14):
There's a really good takedown um in medium called the
The Lifespan of a Lie um and it's based on
that titles based on a I think a documentary by
a documentary or book by a French filmmaker um which
(25:34):
who titled his version The Birth of a Lie and
it's basically about how the Stanford prison experiment was just
basically it was bunked from the get go, which will
kind of pick that apart in a little bit, and
that it's just fascinatingly has been perpetuated over again, basically
fifty years. It just entered the cultural zeitgeist and just
(25:56):
stayed like an infection. All Right. Some other things that
happened to make it realistic. They brought in, um, a
lawyer when parents asked for one, and played along like
it was real. They brought in a chaplain who came
in to speak to prisoners. Uh, and he played along
with it too. Uh. They basically did everything that you
(26:18):
would think would happen in a real prison um on
on a slightly scaled down level. Right, But the upshot
of all of this is Zimbardo saying, like, do you
see what's going on here? Everybody? Like I just put
some guys in, like nine guys in at a time,
or twelve guys as guards, twelve guys as prisoners, and
their parents came for visiting hours, a lawyer came. That's
(26:43):
the that's how real the simulated prison became in people's minds.
Just imagine what a real prisons like, right. So um
and he was saying they could have left at any
time if they just said the safe word, and no
one ever said the safe word. There is some evidence
that these people were basically kept there against their will,
especially after Douglas Corpy basically faked his emotional breakdown and
(27:08):
then was thrown into broom closet and retaliation for it.
Um that he should have very very clearly should have
been left or allowed to leave. And to even be
led to think that you couldn't leave, which is apparently
the idea that spread throughout the prisoners. Um, that would
be like keeping someone against their will. Yeah, and he
(27:30):
did leave, but was supposed to agree to come back, supposedly,
uh to like play a different role as a prisoner
who like maybe escaped and came back I think, but
didn't come back, right, And um, I think five people
were released early before the whole experiment was called off,
all prisoners. No guards left the experiment, which is telling well,
(27:53):
and they were working in shifts that which is important. Okay,
that is a big one too. Um. But but if
you consider that no one asked to be a guard,
they all has to be prisoners. But then none of
the guards left the experiment, that's to me, that's interesting
on its face, right, there's something to that, but um,
they're the whole thing just kind of falling apart after
(28:15):
Zimbardo's girlfriend Um at the time, came um the idea
that up to this point, these people had engaged in
this fantasy and thought that they couldn't leave when they
really could. That's controversial in and of itself, because again
there's evidence that they were led to believe they couldn't leave,
(28:35):
and that's different. That changes things entirely. So you want
to take another break and then pick this part some more. Yeah,
let's do it. Kind of fun alright, the final takedown.
(29:09):
I'm I'm waiting for I'm waiting for Phillipsimbardo to release
a book about like our Jackhammer episode. That's fine, I
would read it, all right, So where are we here? Basically,
we're at the point where uh he is he has
into the experiment and now we're dealing with the fallout
since nine and how this should be viewed. One of
(29:31):
the big things that came out of that French book,
The Birth of a Lie, is the um the filmmaker
unearthed a recording that was I don't know where he
found it, but they he found it and released the
transcript of it that clearly has Um, if not Zimbardo
(29:52):
at least Jaffee. Definitely Jaffee coaching the um the guards
to be more brutal, Right, be a tough guard. Just
think of like how the pigs do it, and do
it like that, I think is what the quote was, right, Yeah,
when the whole idea of this thing is to try
and prove that without any influence, Yes, this is what happens. Right,
(30:12):
So there's a couple of things that happened method Methodologically,
there's a lot of things that happened the moment they
started coaching those guards. Number one, they took any organic
nous out of their behavior. They were then doing what
they thought they were expected to do, like John Wayne
for sure, who just went over the top is what
it was, um. And then number two, they made them
(30:33):
co experimenters. Like the whole thing was supposed to be
guards and prisoners, and we're going to watch as test
subjects or participants. And when you coach the guards, you're
their co experimenters. Now, now the experiments entirely on the
on the prisoners, which you can say, okay, well then
those findings still worked. Well, that gets thrown out when
you base the whole thing on a guy who is
(30:54):
faking right. But but you you make the guards co
experimenters and you just completely take out any objectivity from
this experiment. That's problem one with the methodology. Well, and
the fact we already mentioned that one of one of
the researchers was a warden and zim uh keep on
to call m Zambrano. That's fine. Zimbardo Zamboni himself was
(31:17):
the superintendent, like the minute he decided to do that,
Like I looked up. I think he's like in his
late thirties when he did this. How did he not like,
was he that bad and doing his job? How did
he not know? Like, wait a minute, this will taint
the experiment. Do you want to talk about why the
people think that he was so? Yeah, okay, so he
(31:38):
was a uh he wasn't. I think still is a
social activist for sure, And he had decided, um, and
I can't really disagree with them that prisons were brutal
places where brutality lived, and that they were inherently brutal.
And so if you take somebody and put them into
this place, you're doing a real disservice to humanity by
(31:58):
by throwing somebody in a bruutal place that you know,
is brutal. His aim was to get reformed to happen. Yes,
from the outset. Well, I mean, I can't fault that,
but you can't call it a scientific experiment either. And
it actually supposedly backfired as well, because one interpretation of
his findings is that it's all or nothing with prisons.
(32:20):
Prisons are inherently brutal, or you can't have them. So
either you have prisons and you have brutal prisons, or
you have no prisons. And so, faced with that choice
and with rising crime rates in the seventies, um a
lot of people double down on getting tough and made
prisons even worse and built more prisons and said, t yes,
we're not even gonna try to like reform you anymore,
(32:43):
but we're just gonna send you to these brutal places
that are inherently brutal and there's nothing we can do
about it. So it would have it would have backfired
in that sense, but in in in the idea that
he was doing something with the best interests of his
fellow people at heart. Again, like you said, it's it's
tough to fault him for that. He just really really
(33:04):
gave social psychology a black eye. Yeah. So one of
the other things he did wrong, UM, and this one
I just can't figure out either, is he didn't have
a control group and one of his Um, this guy
wasn't in the experiment, but one of his colleagues came
by one day and was like, you know what, what's
your control what's your independent variable? Yeah, and he was
(33:26):
like what, Yeah, He's like, I don't have one. So
if you if you run a an experiment of any sort,
um grabstre uses a great analogy where if you're trying
to figure out what the effects of radiation are on tomatoes,
you pick a bunch of tomatoes, you weigh them, you
check them for color, um, you make sure that they're
identical to another set of tomatoes. So you have two
(33:49):
sets of basically identical tomatoes. One you radiate, one you
do not, and after a set amount of time you
go back and see what the differences are. And then
you can say probably that when you read the eight tomatoes,
these are the effects, and the effects are the differences
between the two. Same thing with the prison experiment, what
would you have here two different cell blocks and one
(34:10):
that literally isn't coached and completely left alone. That's what
I would have done for sure. And then one where
you're saying, hey, be brutal, and yeah, we'll see if
everyone falls into these roles exactly that that would have
been great. And actually some researchers in two thousand one
they did exactly that. They basically ran the experiment with
just that control group you suggested. Um, it was called
(34:31):
the BBC Prison Study. Yeah, has Lem and Riker. Yeah,
and basically they did the same thing. They they they
did not do any coaching, they didn't do any intervention.
They did the the thing exactly like you're supposed to,
or like Zimbardo should have from the outset. And um,
they found that again they made the control group to
the original Stanford prison experiment, they found that the exact
(34:54):
opposite happened. The prisoners stayed banded together, the guards were
totally in disarray, um and disorganized. The brutality never emerged. Um,
and there wasn't any violence from what I understand. And
this is where it gets really scummy. If he asked me.
Zimbardo found out about this, and supposedly Hasselman Reicher said
(35:14):
they discovered he was privately writing editors, uh to keep
them from getting published and claiming that they were fraudulent. Yeah,
in the journal that they they released their findings, and
he wrote in an appendage to their their article and said,
these are they just don't even listen to these guys.
I'm Philip Simbardo. Man. So yeah, I thought that was
(35:37):
pretty scummy too if he did that. Um, so you've
got methodologically, there's even more problems too. If in the
in the original newspaper advertisement, chuck, he said, um, prison experiment,
prison experiment. Everybody sign up. Yeah, that was a problem
in itself. They shouldn't have known what they were doing, no,
exactly until they showed up, right, So you're gonna get
(35:58):
a big, wide swath of people, and then once they
find out what the experiment is, maybe they'll say no
thanks or whatever. But this was like attracting um. A
two thousand and seven follow up study found narcissistic, hostile,
overly aggressive authoritarian types like flies to honey or the opposite. Well,
(36:21):
that seems to be the case in this case, yeah,
which was in fact, one of them was a liberal
activist who kind of purposely went in there because he
thought maybe these findings could be used one day for
prison reform. Well, I think also most of the UM
what I got from Jaffee coaching the people to say, like,
think about what the pigs would do, and then do
(36:41):
do that, because we really got to show them how
how brutal prisons are. Um. I think everybody who showed
up basically was against prisons. But whether you're against prisons
or forum, you were automatically tainted before you even showed
up for the interview because they wrote prison experiment in
the ad. So from the outset there was biased, There
(37:03):
was no control group. It attracted a bias cross section
of people participated. He was a participant, and that actually
chuck led to the second set of findings that Zimbardo
had influenced this and become a participant himself. And here's
(37:23):
the current interpretation of all of it. Okay, this seems
to be the current dujur interpretation of the Stanford prison experiment.
Not that people are inherently cruel and inherently will just
crumble in the face of authority, although that that might
still stand, but that people will be are capable of
(37:45):
cruelty if they're recruited by an authority. Figure the second set,
and there's actually been three sets of interpretations. The second
set was that Zimbardo inserted himself and that it actually
demonstrated what's called situation fist theory. Yeah, and that's basically
that external circumstances are the drivers of human behavior. Right,
(38:07):
So the point was not that people are inherently cruel
on an individual level, but the situation that they're put in,
they will quickly find those roles if there's a power
structure above them, that is, that has normalized this and
is expecting them to fulfill those roles. And this really
tied in with you know, this is one people were
(38:29):
still really trying to figure out what the heck had
just happened with the Nazis. It was only like years before.
So this idea that this banality of evil, this made
perfect sense in that in that respect, right, there is
a bureaucracy that had normalized evil and you were just
following orders. That was the second interpretation of the Stanford
(38:51):
prison experiment. Yeah. Well, and not just the Nazis, but
everything like the Vietnam War, which was I mean, this
is one, and like the Myley massacre, and you know,
I was just following orders like this tied in this
has his fingers in a lot of relevant politics of
the day. Right, So, um, apparently it also tied in
(39:12):
really well to Attica, and Zimbardo must have just couldn't
believe is his good fortune that there was a there's
alotiest prison riot in American history happened like a couple
of weeks after he made the news in the New
York Times magazine with this journal art or this article
that he wrote, right, But that actually played into it too,
because apparently, following orders, a lot of guards just fired
(39:34):
blindly into the tear gas smoke of this prison riot
and killed tons of of unarmed prisoners and hostages. So
so Zimbard is like, Okay, that's fine, however we're going
to interpret this. I'm cool with that. But the third one,
I'm not quite sure that he would be cool with
the current one, which is bad science, I think. So
(39:57):
what I saw is that a lot of social psychologists
we've known this is bad science all along, but the
findings were really interesting and worthwhile, so we didn't throw
the baby out with the bathwater. The third one is
that that Zimbardo inserted himself and what this, what this
this study really showed was that people will engage in
(40:19):
acts of cruelty if there is a figure of authority
recruiting them to what they think is a righteous cause.
And in this case it was Zimbardo making the guards
co experiment ers by coaching them to be cruel and
in in the name of prison reform. Ultimately, when they
showed the world what happens when you put normal people
(40:41):
in a prison situation. Yeah, which is what the John
Wayne guy very much has said all his life since then,
is that this is what they I thought they wanted
was for me to be a bad guard so we
could prove, uh, ultimately that prisons need reform. And that
that is why he's still complicit, because he's still engaged
in these acts of genuine cruelty against the prisoners in
(41:04):
the study. And that's why he should still feel bad
and still does feel bad. But he did it because
he was recruited in the name of this rights is
caused by somebody who was in authority. So is this
being taught this way in classes now? I don't I
think that they, especially once it came out the Zimbardo
and at the very least his warden co experiment er
(41:24):
was was coaching them to do this and that the
organic cruelty is just totally out the window. I think
they don't know what to do with it right now.
They're trying to figure out like how to get these
findings across or what to make of them. Because one
one of these quotes from the article you sent the
guy said, I don't think it's scientific fraud in the
typical sense. It was never considered to be scientific. It's
(41:46):
typically represented in classrooms as a demonstration, uh, not an experiment.
And there's a notorious case of ethical malfeasance. So that's
almost a fourth takeaway is that it's an example have
how to not do a study correctly, which is interesting.
Oh yeah, I mean methodologically inserting yourself, like lying about
(42:09):
the findings later on, or misinterpreting the results or using spin.
It's yeah, there's a lot here. But it was approved
by the Stanford Human Rights Subjects Review Committee at the time.
Those were Zimbardo's experiments. We presented this too, uh And
there you know, he still says that it was ethical. Well,
it was at the time under the guidelines, it was ethical,
(42:31):
but then after they changed the guidelines, you couldn't do
this today, or at least not with like he did it. So,
I did you remember the very brief psychology is nuts serious?
Watch that I did win on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah,
I watched that today, did you What do you think
it was good? Thanks? Man? Cute little background? Yeah, I
thought so too. Um and let's see you got anything else? No,
(42:55):
I mean, boy, I thought we were pretty scathing, but
we were. This is like vaping love all scathing. This
is way worse than vaporing. I'm sure the vapors are
like going. They were really hard on that guy. Yeah.
The movie, uh, you know, the documentary is probably a
little more accurate. But the movie wasn't bad. I mean
it's not great, Yeah, but it was okay. It felt
(43:16):
like a movie the week it's an airplane movie. Yeah,
watch it on your next poine. That my recommendation, Thanks buddy. Well,
if you want to know more about the Stanford Prison Experiment, um,
type those words in the search part how stuff works
dot comm and it will bring up this grab store article.
Since I said grab store, it's time for listener mail.
(43:37):
I'm gonna call this beautiful landscaping. Hey, guys, it's spent
in the last two years fixing up the yard. Uh
in our house. Uh in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. Oh, that
sounds like a pleasant place. Yeah it is. My husband
actually introducing your show a few years back, and thank
god he did, because I've literally listened to you for
hours and hours while working in the yard. It was
a huge undertaking. I have a more flexible work schedule
(43:59):
the he does, so I volunteered to absorb most of
the responsibility, although he did a lot of heavy looking.
To enjoyed the show so much, I stopped allowing myself
to listen to to it any other time. You were
only allowed during yard work. This made me much more
ready to get outside and get into it. You guys
were with me while I carried literally tons of red
stone uphill and buckets, hauling rocks for a firing landing,
(44:21):
planted uh pecky sandra ferns and hostas, and the rocky
soil I've ever had to work with, and just clearing
away over growth which it sounds like Tanya Harding training
for the Olympics, and that one that one montage, which
it turned out included a fair amount of poison ivy.
During it all, I learned about tiny adorable little creature
called it's heart degrade, the business of head transplants, the
(44:44):
hookworm her favorite episode, and some haunting information I cannot
and hear, such as you provided in the bullfighting and
drowning episodes. You're always very entertaining, full of information. Even
when I think it's boring, you make it fun. There
were times you had me l o l ng in
my back ard alone and covered in dirt and sweat
like a crazy person. Attached her some pictures of the progress,
(45:06):
all from your climate controlled studio, that is from Sharon Prashynski.
And Sharon, you did a great job. That is one
beautiful yard you got going. Yeah, for sure, it is lovely.
It is nice work. We're glad we could be there
with you to help you get up that hill. Yeah,
and down the hill and then back up the hill
and back down the hill. That's right, and then back
(45:28):
up again. Uh. If you want to get in touch
with us to let us know how we've helped you out,
we love hearing that kind of stuff. If you're Phillip Lombardo,
we expect to hear from your lawyer. Um. And in
the meantime you can hang out with us at our
home on the web. Stuff you should Know dot com,
where you can find all of our social links, and
you can also send us an email to Stuff Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
(45:53):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com