Can a good person become a bad person because of the environment around them? To try to answer this question, a professor from one of the most important universities in the United States decided to conduct a social experiment. He called on students to take part in a practical exercise for two weeks.
But what could be just another academic study on the behavior of human beings ended up with police involvement, people in chains, torture practices and had to be dramatically interrupted before a tragedy occurred. happened. This is the story of the Stanford imprisonment experiment.
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I see you. Back to the video. The story I'm going to tell in this video takes place in August 1971, but to understand the context in which all this happened, we need to go back even further back in time and swap California's sunny summer for Germany's harsh winter.
We are at the end of 1945 in Nuremberg. The Second World War was finally over. O he horror imposed by the Nazis had come to an end and it was time for a reckoning.
And so, the United States, the Soviet Union, France and the United Kingdom, which are the allied countries that won the war, decided to create a court to try the crimes committed by the Nazis. It was the famous Nuremberg Tribunal. Some of the regime's top commanders were not tried.
And that because at the end of the war, many of them decided to seal their fates on their own and went voluntarily dragged down. It then falls to the newly formed court to judge representatives of the ex-police officers from the ranks just below them, such as ministers, businessmen and Nazi ideologues. And the reason I bring up the Nuremberg Tribunal here is because during the trial, many of the accused presented a very similar line of defense, that they practiced all those atrocities just because they were following orders from their superiors.
Good, their defense didn't do much good because almost all of them were convicted. But this defense strategy caught the attention of Professor Stanley Milgram, of the American University of Yale. He was Jewish and his life was directly affected by the Holocaust.
So he decided to put the Nuremberg defendants' arguments to the test. And at the beginning of the 1960s began what became known as the Milgram experiment. The idea was to find out to what point of cruelty human beings can reach just because they are following orders from a superior.
The test worked more or less like this. 40 people were called to participate, supposedly in a study on memory. Each volunteer was taken to a room together with a test advisor, while an actor was taken to a room off to the side.
This actor is was a guinea pig who would have his memory tested. He had to memorize a list of words, but he got some of them wrong on purpose. And then, with every mistake he made, the coach asked him to volunteer to press a button to shock the poor guy in the other room with different intensities.
The weakest would be 15 volts and the strongest 450 volts. But the shock was actually a fake. The actor was only shouting to pretend it was hurting.
But the volunteer who was giving the shock didn't knew that. If he refused, the coach insisted three more times, just to see if at some point the volunteer would be convinced to do the evil thing. As a result, everyone, literally everyone, pressed the shock button at some point.
And in high intensities, including up to 300 volts. And two thirds of them went further, applying a maximum voltage of 450 volts. And most of them justified themselves by saying that they only did what the experiment leader told them to do.
Yes, a shocking result. But at least in this experiment nobody suffered any real damage. It was all a simulation, very different from what would happen years later at a university on the other side of the United States.
And that's why from Yale, in Connecticut, we finally go to Stanford, in California. Inspired by Milgram's work, psychologist and professor Philip Zimbardo decided to go further in search for an answer to the question of human obedience and evil. And in the early 1970s, he put what is still considered one of the most famous and cruelest tests in history of psychology.
The Stanford imprisonment experiment. It all started with an ad pinned to the walls of the university and published in local newspapers. The proposal?
15 dollars a day for the first volunteer who agreed to spend two weeks in a fictitious prison. And here goes remember that 15 dollars more than 50 years ago would have had a very different real value to today. Taking into inflation in the United States over this whole period, that would be the equivalent of about 110 dollars.
Converted to reals today, just to give us an idea, that would be a little over 500 real. Times 14 days. We're talking about something like 7,000 reais to spend two weeks of vacation in a fake prison, help advance science and even earn complementary hours in college.
That sounds like the perfect plan. But if it had been the same perfect, it wouldn't have turned into the subject of this video. So stay there and I'll tell you everything that happened.
In all, 75 boys applied. The 24 chosen were divided into two groups, the jailers and the prisoners. To decide who would be in which group, the researchers used an advanced technique the scientific technique of a random vertical coin toss, also known as a dear crown.
In other words, an exercise in luck sealed what would happen to all those people. They were very different destinations. To begin with, the guards were normally invited to to the university to take part in the test.
The prisoners were literally arrested. In a first indication of the bizarreness that was about to happen, the local police accepted to take part in the experiment and picked up all the volunteers from their homes one by one. They were handcuffed and transported in a car blindfolded towards the false prison, built in the basement of the university itself.
The campus was practically deserted because summer vacation in the United States. It was the perfect setting to create a feeling of isolation. Empty rooms, one next to the other, have been turned into cells.
Everything has been thought out and all of them, for example, were given uniforms, sunglasses and cudgels. As for the prisoners, as soon as they arrived, they had to be completely naked and were disinfected with a spray. And then received some kind of rag, like a baggy shirt with no underwear, a pair of sandals from and a nylon cap to make it look like their heads had been shaved.
And they still were forced to wear a chain around their ankles the entire time. All this was intended to purpose of taking away everyone's identity. To turn everyone into a single mass without their individualities.
That's why the prisoners have even lost their names. They were identified only by a number that was written on each one's uniform. And that was just the beginning of the humiliation to they would be subjected to over the next few days.
From then on things only got worse, in an escalation of tension that got worse all the time. The guards were told that it wasn't allowed to practice physical violence. And I emphasize the word physical.
Because that meant that other forms of violence, such as psychological, were liberated. And it wasn't long before they began to put this into practice. When they realized that they were in a position superior hierarchical position, even if only in a fictitious way, the jailers made a point of to show who was in charge.
At first it was mockery, then humiliation and then complete sadism, in other words, the pleasure of causing suffering. They began to dictate arbitrary rules of behavior. They demanded how they wanted to be treated and how the prisoners should act.
Shouting and swearing have become routine. If a prisoner disobeyed an order, he was punished on the spot, sometimes with push-ups, sometimes with sit-ups and sometimes, I don't know, being forced to sing a song. All extremely disrespectful, only with the intention to make fun of the group of inmates.
Another common way of annoying the inmates was to wake them up them in the middle of the night, taking everyone out into the corridor and doing a count. By the way, sleep deprivation is a classic torture technique. And added to the fact that there are no windows or a clock in the cells, it led the inmates to quickly lose track of time.
And there was also the deprivation of basic needs. When they saw fit, the guards simply forbade the prisoners to go to the bathroom. They were often forced to use a bucket in front of everyone.
And another technique to stress the environment was to mix up the inmates from each cell, making it difficult for them to communicate with each other. Or offer treatments different treatments for the obedient and the non-obedient, increasing the spirit of rivalry among the prisoners themselves. The old divide and conquer strategy.
With so many ways to tense the atmosphere, it was to be expected that one day things would explode. And that's exactly what happened what happened. Prisoners revolted by the situation started rioting.
They rioted in cells and the guards fired fire extinguishers at them to control the rebellion. Another form of punishment was solitary confinement, a small compartment in which troublemakers were thrown in and kept in the dark for hours. One of the prisoners who were taken to solitary confinement, for example, received the punishment because he decided to go on a hunger strike.
He was forced to stay inside holding the sausages he refused to eat. And he just was able to leave when Philippe Zimbardo himself, the professor responsible for the study, decided to intervene. Incidentally, this was just one of the moments when the researcher directly interfered in what was going on he was watching the experiment through a camera as if it were a kind of Big Brother from prison.
On the fourth day, for example, when he heard a rumor about a possible escape plan, he arrived to ask the local police to have the whole experiment transferred to a prison block of which was deactivated. But the police refused, because everything has a limit. The experiment continued at the university and the prisoners' desire to leave that place also remained.
But knowing that they wouldn't get a dime if they quit in the middle, almost everyone accepted to continue living that nightmare. Almost. Two students couldn't resist the pressure and dropped out the test at some point.
And with that, little by little, the experiment began to collapse. The prisoners who remained felt even more desolate. Crying spells were becoming more and more common.
Humiliations too only increased and fights became very frequent. The hostility kept growing between the two groups and chaos began to reign in the atmosphere. The impression that a tragedy could happen at any moment.
And that's why, after much resistance, Professor Zimbardo chose to abort the experiment. The project, which was supposed to take 14 days, lasted only 6. One of the people who led Zimbardo to suspend that pandemonium was researcher Christina Maslar, who was his girlfriend at the time.
But even though the experiment had come to an end, the controversies surrounding everything that happened that week at Stanford were only just beginning. Zimbardo came under criticism for ethical issues. After all, a researcher can submit human beings to such degrading situations?
Imagine the trauma that accompanied the lives of those university students who took part in the experiment. In addition, in recent decades evidence has emerged that Zimbardo manipulated parts of the research to get the results he wanted. Remember those interferences I mentioned?
Recordings of the experiment reveal that they were more frequent than the teacher with. He encouraged, for example, that the jailers to act in a hostile manner. One of the students who acted as a guard said that if behaved like an actor because he was led to believe that this was what he was supposed to do during the experiment.
Furthermore, an actual ex-convict who assisted Zimbardo in the study admitted that it was the one who suggested the bucket idea. Another loose end in the survey has to do with with the footage. There are only records of 15 of the 150 hours that the test lasted, which makes it difficult to determine more in-depth peer review of what actually happened in this experiment at the university.
That's why, in 2006, the BBC broadcaster funded a new study by British psychologists, who replicated the experiment for 8 days, but without the interferences that happened at Stanford. This time, the result was less alarming. And the guards even had a hard time impose their authority.
All this shows that ethics were far from Professor Zimbardo's behavior. Even so, to this day he is recognized as one of the most important names in psychology in the last century. century.
And this is undoubtedly due to the fame that the Stanford imprisonment experiment has gained in recent decades. The case has given rise to documentaries, fiction films and even, books, written by the researcher himself. The work was given the suggestive name of Effect Lucifer, understanding how good people become evil.
The book starts from the events at Stanford to reflect on what generates evil in people's minds. And then we come back to the question from the beginning of this video. Can a good person become bad?
The search for the answer leads us to question the question itself. After all, first of all, are there good people and bad people? This topic has permeated the minds of thinkers for centuries.
In the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that man is born good and society corrupts him. John Locke, on the other hand, defended the theory of tabula rasa, the idea that the human mind is like a blank sheet of paper and our experiences go shape who we are going to be. Despite the controversies surrounding the Stanford experiment, the work shows that the line between good and evil is thinner than we think.
And that there is a gray area between goodness and evil that depends on a multitude of factors. After this experiment, psychology itself became more rigorous about the ethics of experiments and the way to study people, precisely to try to influence them as little as possible, since every research will have its limitations and interferences. Unlike movies and cartoons, real life is not Manichean, separated into good and evil.
Who's to say that heroes and villains wouldn't swap places? roles if they had each other's skin? That the bandit who steals at the sign wouldn't be a poet if he didn't lived in the midst of inequality?
Or that the policeman who upholds the law would not become a thief if had nothing to eat? This goes beyond the question of whether it's good or bad, and leads us to think about the very essence of the human being. After all, you would be you, in any time, in any space?
Or the random place where you were born, at the time you existed, defines exactly who you are? We are merely the fruits of our own decisions or is our identity also formed by the world around us? These are questions that cross politics, biology, philosophy and various other areas of knowledge.
We'll probably never be able to decipher all the variables in the complex equation whose result is our character. But perhaps the page that men and women occupy in the books of history is determined not only by the choices they made in life, but also by the path they took in life. that life itself reserved for them on the day and in the place they were born.
You really are a good person and would be on any occasion? I'd like to know what you think in the comments. Thank you very much and see you next time!
