The Stanford Prison Experiment turned out to be a lie.
“The Story of One Lie”How a famous psychological experiment became a theatrical production
Thibault Le Texier, Histoire d’un mensonge,Everyone has probably heard of psychologist Philip Zimbardo's “Stanford Prison Experiment,” in which a group of ordinary American students were placed in conditions simulating a prison, where some of them had to play the role of prisoners and others the role of guards. As a result, in just a few days, half of the intelligent young people who found themselves in the role of guards turned into cruel fascists, while the other half, who played prisoners, became depressed, passive victims. At least, that is how Zimbardo himself described it, as well as in numerous documentary, semi-fictional, and fictional books and films based on the experiment.
French sociologist, economist, and journalist Thibault Le Texier was a big fan of Zimbardo and his experiment and also decided to make a documentary about it. But since so much had already been filmed and written about the experiment by that time, Le Texier wanted to find something new, details that no one had talked about yet. In search of these details, he turned to the Stanford University archives and, to his amazement, discovered that they contained detailed records (including video and audio) of the experiment that no one had accessed in decades.
Le Texier sat down to examine these records—and was even more astonished to discover that literally everything we know about the Stanford experiment from Zimbardo himself was a lie.
As a result, Le Texier decided not to make the film. Instead, he wrote a book called The Story of a Lie — and the scale of this lie is staggering. From what Le Texier writes, from the documents he found and the digitized tapes available on the Stanford website, which anyone can read and hear for themselves, it follows that Zimbardo lied about everything: how and by whom the experiment was conceived, how and who was recruited as participants, what instructions they were given, what conditions they signed up for, how and why the experiment had to be terminated early, and, most importantly, how the guards and prisoners actually behaved.
No, the guards did not turn into sadists; only one of them showed sadistic tendencies, and two others treated the prisoners quite harshly, but most either behaved neutrally or even helped the prisoners. No, the prisoners did not turn into oppressed rags; they constantly rebelled actively. No, even those guards who pressured the prisoners did so not on their own initiative, but because they received persistent instructions to pressure them and instructions on how best to do so from Zimbardo himself and his assistants (and most of the guards sabotaged these instructions). No, not all of the participants in the experiment were clean-cut, intelligent students; among them were random people, some with criminal histories. No, the experiment was not interrupted because the guards' behavior got out of control and became increasingly sadistic, and Zimbardo's girlfriend at the time, who happened to see this, was horrified and demanded that they immediately stop tormenting people — Zimbardo's girlfriend was one of the experimenters. and the experiment got out of control in a completely different sense — the more time passed, the more the guards stopped following instructions and their relationship with the prisoners became better and better, threatening to undermine Zimbardo's main goal. Which was not scientific at all, but political. “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” as the documents found by Le Texier convincingly show, was not an experiment, but a spectacle designed to horrify the American public and force politicians to reform and humanize the terrible conditions of prisoners in American prisons (which Zimbardo had never visited and did not even really know what was going on in them).
As a result, Zimbardo's story about how circumstances can turn anyone into a fascist or a victim is transformed by Le Texier into a story about how one particular person is willing to resort to deception and exploit others in order to achieve the high-profile result he desires. It also shows how lies evolve as the truth is revealed (in the years since the experiment, some details that were not very pleasant for Zimbardo have gradually come to light, although before The Story of a Lie, this was only the tip of the iceberg). From 1971, when Zimbardo gave his first presentation on the experiment just a couple of days after it ended, to 2007, when his book The Lucifer Effect was published, Zimbardo changed both his description of the experiment and his interpretation of its results several times — but during all that time, he never told the whole truth. Le Texier had to do it.
Books that completely change your view of a well-known event are very rare, and this book is undoubtedly one of them. Le Texier conducted thorough research and wrote a story that is no less exciting than a good detective novel. The only thing that detracts from the book is that Le Texier, being French, cannot restrain himself and from time to time launches into lengthy moralizing arguments that are completely unnecessary in the book — the facts he has found speak for themselves. But the book is so good and important that even this hardly spoils it. I really hope that it will soon be translated into English — the American press has already written quite a lot about it — and then into Russian.
https://medium.com/novynovgorod/books-2017-2018-8c5b1fccc631#
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