Longevity of lies

The most famous psychological experiment of all time turned out to be a hoax. Why can't we get away from the Stanford prison experiment?

Late in the evening on August 16, 1971, twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a skinny, short Berkeley graduate with a shock of pale uncombed hair, closed in a dark room in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, without clothes, except for a thin white shirt with the number 8612, yelled at the top of his mouth.

“Lord, I’m all burning! He shouted, fiercely kicking the door. - You do not understand? I want to get out of here! This is a complete kapets! I can not stand another night! I just can't take it anymore! ”

It was a defining moment of what was perhaps the most famous psychological study of all time. Did you find out about Philip Zimbardo ’s famous " Stanford Prison Experiment " (STE) at the introductory lesson in psychology, or absorbed this information from the cultural ether - you probably heard this story.

Zimbardo, a young psychology professor at Stanford, built a prison imitation in Jordan Hall basement and populated her with nine “prisoners” and nine “guards”, young men who responded to a newspaper ad, who were assigned roles at random and paid a good daily rate for participation. The main "employees" of the prison were Zimbardo himself and several of his students.

The study was supposed to last two weeks, but after the girl Zimbardo visited him at work six days later and saw the conditions in which people are kept in the “Stanford District Prison”, she persuaded him to stop. Since then, the story of the security guards who flew off the coils and the frightened prisoners, who got into a breakdown one after another, became world famous and turned into a cultural milestone, which was described in books, documentaries and feature films - even in one episode of the series Veronica Mars .

This experiment is often used as a lesson, suggesting that our behavior is fundamentally dependent on social roles and situations in which we fall. But its deeper and more unpleasant consequence is that we all have a hidden, inexhaustible source of sadism, which is just waiting for circumstances to allow it to open. It was used to explain the massacre at Songmei in Vietnam, the Armenian genocide , the horrors of the Holocaust . And the maximum symbol of agony caused by a man to his brothers is the famous Korpi psychological disorder that occurred just 36 hours after the start of the experiment, and caused by the cruelty of his comrades.

But there is one problem: Korpi’s upset was staged.

“Any clinician would immediately understand that I was pretending,” he told me last summer, in the first extensive interview he had decided to give in many years. - If you listen to the recording, it is not so difficult to notice. I'm not such a good actor. I mean, I probably did a good job, but there is more tantrum than psychosis. ”

Now Korpi, a forensic psychologist, told me that his dramatic performance in the experiment was caused by fear, but not to the cruelty of the guards. He was worried that he would not be able to get into graduate school.

“I agreed to this job because I decided that I would be able to prepare for the GRE test all day long, ” Korpi explained about one type of exam for postgraduate studies, which is often used for admission of students, and added that the exam should have started immediately. the end of the experiment. Shortly after the experiment began, he asked for his textbooks. Prison staff denied him that. The next day he asked for it again. Did not work. And then he decided that, as he told me, "there was no point in this work." At first, Korpi tried to pretend that he had a stomach ache. When it didn’t work, he tried to pretend a mental disorder. At the same time, as he says, he did not experience any breakdowns, but rather had fun with most of the time in prison - except for an episode of a fight with guards from behind the bed.

“The first day was very interesting,” recalls Korpi. - The riot was interesting. There was no punishment. We knew that the guards could not hurt us, they could not beat us. They were white students, just like us, so the situation was safe. It was just a job. If you listen to the recording, you can hear it in my voice: I had a great job. I could scream, shout, make tantrums. I could behave like a prisoner. I was a good employee. Was cool".

For Korpi, the worst thing about the whole experiment was that he was told that he could not leave him, regardless of his desire.

“I was shocked,” he said. - One thing is when a policeman arrests me, drives me in a car, forces me to change into a robe. But the fact that I could not leave was a new level. I just thought, “oh my goodness.” That was my feeling. ”

Another prisoner, Richard Yakko, recalls how shocked he was on the second day of the experiment, when he asked the employee how to leave the prison and found out that he could not do it. The third, Clay Ramsay, was so shocked to learn that he was trapped, that he began a hunger strike. “I treated this as a real prison, because to get out of there, you had to do something that would make them worry about their responsibility,” Ramzi told me.

When in May I asked Zimbardo about the statements of Korpi and Yakko, he first denied the fact that they had to remain in prison. “This is a lie,” he said. - It's a lie".

But this is no longer just the word Zimbardo against their words. In April, the French scientist and director Thibault le Texier published the book Histoire d'un Mensonge [History of Lies], examining recently published documents from the Zimbardo archives at Stanford to tell a completely different story of the experiment. After Zimbardo told me that the charges of Korpi and Yakko were groundless, I read him a transcript found by Les Texier, made from Zimbardo's recorded conversation with his “co-workers” on the third day of the simulation: “An interesting thing with these guys, two guys, who came yesterday and said they wanted to leave — I told them “no,” Zimbardo told staff. You can leave only for two reasons - medical and psychiatric. I think they believed they could not leave. ”

“Okay, fine,” Zimbardo corrected in a telephone conversation with me. He acknowledged that in the forms of informed consent signed by the subjects a special safe phrase was indicated: “I leave the experiment”. Only this exact phrase could make them let go.

“None of them said that,” said Zimbardo. - They said: "I want to go out." I need a doctor. I want to mom, “and so on and so forth. I, in fact, said: “You must say:“ I am leaving the experiment. ”

But in the forms of informed consent, which were signed by the subjects, and which can now be downloaded from the site of Zimbardo himself, there is not a single mention of the phrase "I leave the experiment."

In the standard Zimbardo narrative about the experiment, the prisoners' emotional reaction is given as evidence of how strongly the inappropriate attitude of the guards influenced them. The shock of real imprisonment provides a simpler and never revolutionary explanation. The experiment could lead to legal consequences if the prisoners decided to go to court. Korpi said that he considered the greatest regret of his life that he had failed to condemn Zimbardo.

“Why did we not sue for unlawful restriction of freedom?” Korpi asked during the interview. It's humiliating! We had to do something! "

According to James Kahan, the former prosecutor of Santa Clara County, where Stanford University is located, Korpi could well have done it: six hours after Korpi announced his desire to leave the experiment, most of which he spent in a locked room, to meet the parameters of restraint in California.

“If he says,“ I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to talk to you about leaving, ”said Kakhen,“ and then they lock him in the room, and at some point he tries to go out, asks him to let him go, to talk as a hired employee, or who he was there, and he is not able to leave the room - it practically goes beyond the limits of informed consent and approaches a violation of the criminal code. ”



Although Zimbardo loves starting an experiment story from Sunday, August 15, 1971, when the guards began harassing new arrivals to prisoners at the Stanford District Prison - setting things up as if they had turned to cruelty on their own - it would be more honest to start the story a day earlier, with a coordination meeting with guards. Then Zimbardo, referring to them more as employees, rather than as subjects, clearly indicated that the guards were expected to help in creating the right mood among the prisoners, a sense of helplessness and fear.

“We cannot use physical punishment or torture,” Zimbardo told them, as follows from the records, first released fifteen years after the experiment. - We can create boredom. Feeling of frustration. To cause them fear to a certain extent. We have in our hands all the power over the situation, but they don’t. ”



Most of the meeting was led by David Jaff, a student who played the role of the “warden”, whose contribution to the Zimbardo experiment had been underestimated for a long time. In reality, it was Jaff and several students who came up with the idea of ​​a prison simulation three months before, as homework assigned to the class in which Zimbardo taught. Jaff appointed some of his neighbors in the hostel in Toion Hall as prisoners, and some guards, and he came up with 15 draconian rules that the guards had to enforce, including: “Prisoners should address each other only by numbers”, “Prisoners should not describe his condition with words such as "experiment" and "simulation", or "Inability to obey any of the rules attracts punishment." Zimbardo was so touched by the dramatic results of the two-day Jaff experiment, that he decided to try it himself, this time randomly selecting guards and prisoners, and extending the experiment for a longer period. Since Zimbardo himself had never been in a real prison, the standards of realism were determined by the research of Jaffa and the scary memories of Carlo Prescott, who was released on bail from San Quentin prison, whom Zimbardo met through Jaffa and invited as a consultant. Jaffa was given extraordinary freedom in planning an experiment to reproduce previous results. “Dr. Zimbardo suggested that the most difficult thing would be to force the guards to behave like guards,” Jaff wrote in an evaluation of the experiment following it. “I was asked to suggest tactics based on my experience as a sadistic specialist. I was charged with the responsibility of organizing the behavior of "tough guards." Although Zimbardo often argued that the guards themselves set the rules, in fact most of them were directly taken from Jaff's homework, and voiced at the coordination meeting on Saturday. Jaff also suggested to the guards the idea of ​​how to pester the prisoners, forcing them, for example, to remove the spikes from dirty blankets that had previously been lying on the grass.

After the start of the simulation, Jaff directly corrected the behavior of the guards, who behaved not cool enough, implanting pathological behavior, which Zimbardo would later declare as if it had appeared naturally.

“The guards needed to understand that they would all play the role of what is called a tough guard, ” Jaff told one of the guards (starting at 8:35). “I hope that thanks to this research, very serious recommendations on reform will appear ... that we will be able to go out with this in the media, in the press, and say:" That's what is really meant "... Try to react as you imagine the reaction dirty cops.

Although most of the guards played their roles without brilliance, and some even carried out small requests from prisoners, one of them eagerly got down to business: Dave Eshelman, whom the prisoners nicknamed " John Wayne " for his southern accent and inventive cruelty. But Eshelman, who studied acting in high school and college, always admitted that his accent was just as fake as Korpi’s nervous breakdown. His goal, as he told me in an interview, was to help successfully conduct the experiment.

“I took it all as an improvisation exercise,” said Eshelman. “I thought I was doing what the researchers wanted from me, and decided that I would do it better than the others, pretending to be this disgusting guard. I have never been to the South, but I used a southern accent, taking it from the movie " Cool Luke ".

Eshelman expressed his regret to me that he did not treat the prisoners badly, adding that he sometimes turned to his own experience, having experienced a rude attitude on the part of his brother several months earlier. "I went too far," he said. But Zimbardo and his staff seemed to approve of his actions. At the end of the experiment, Zimbardo singled out and thanked him.

“When I was walking down the corridor,” recalls Eshelman, “he came up to me on purpose and made it clear that I did an excellent job. I really decided that I had achieved something good that I had made a contribution to understanding human nature. "

According to Alex Haslam and Stefan Riker, psychologists who jointly tried to reproduce SHE in Britain in 2001, a critical factor in causing people to be brutal is the statement of their leader that they serve the highest moral purpose with which they identify themselves - for example scientific progress or prison reform. We were taught that the guards brutally treated inmates in a Stanford prison because of the opportunities provided by their role, but Haslam and Riker claim that their behavior was due to their identification not with the goal but with the experimenters, which Jaff and Zimbardo constantly encouraged . Eshelman, who described himself in the admission questionnaire as a “scientist in the soul,” probably identified himself with others more diligently than others, but Jaff himself admitted in his assessment: “I am amazed at the ease with which I can turn off my susceptibility and anxiety for others people for the sake of a worthy goal. ”



From the outset, Zimbardo sought to widely publicize his experiment in the media, allowing KRON television from San Francisco to remove imitations of arrests, and sending them periodic press releases as events unfold. But the prison simulation quickly attracted more attention than he could have imagined. By August 21, one day after the premature closure of the experiment, an attempt by a radical black activist and author of the best-selling book “Soledad Brother” (Soledad Brother) [Soledad is a city in California known for its prison] George Jackson tried to escape from San Quentin prison located an hour north of Stanford, which led to the death of three guards and three prisoners, including himself. KRON instantly organized a televised debate between Zimbardo and the assistant prison director of San Quentin. After three weeks, predominantly black inmates of the Attika Correctional Facility in New York State rebelled , seized control of the prison from predominantly white guards, and demanded improved treatment conditions. By order of Governor Nelson Rockefeller to regain control of the prison by force, law enforcement agencies dropped tear gas canisters from helicopters, after which hundreds of police officers and prison guards began shooting blindly in clouds of smoke, destroying both prisoners and their hostages.

This incident, which occurred before the era of mass executions, which have since become the norm for American news headlines, was a shocking slaughter — one of the biggest deaths since the Civil War itself , according to the findings of the Attic Special Commission of New York. The country was desperately looking for answers, and the Zimbardo experiment seemed to give them, placing guards and prisoners on the same moral plane - as joint victims of the penitentiary system - although in fact in Attica most of the killings were caused by the police and guards. The story of Zimbardo about how the guards went out of control and terrorized prisoners for the first time became the object of general attention in a special twenty-minute NBC report published in prime time. Richard Yakko told the NBC reporter that he and other prisoners were told that they could not leave the experiment, but after he failed to confirm the Zimbardo story about how the prisoners "organically joined" their roles, he was cut out of the program ( but the record remained ).

In his 1973 article for the New York Times Magazine, Zimbardo unequivocally pointed out that the disruption of Korpi was real. By the mid-1980s, when he asked Korpi to participate in the Phil Donahue show and the documentary Silent Rage, Korpi had long made it clear that he was pretending, but Zimbardo still wanted to include a nervous breakdown in the experiment. Korpi went about him.

“If he wanted to tell me that I had a nervous breakdown, it seemed not so important,” he told me. - I did not really resist. I thought it was an exaggeration, which benefited Phil's goals. ”

In Silent Rage, Zimbardo presented Korpi’s dramatic audio recording of Korpi’s “nervous breakdown”, saying that “he started playing the role of a madman, but soon the role became too real, and he slipped into uncontrollable rage.” A record segment in which Korpi admits to playing a role, and described how tedious it was to do this for so many hours, was cut out. Korpi told me that Zimbardo had molested him with requests to continue to appear in the media long after Korpi had asked him to stop it, and pressed on him with periodic offers of professional help.

“We removed the phone from the phone book, and Zimbardo found out our phone,” Korpi said. - It was very strange. I told him: “I don’t want to deal with this experiment anymore.” “But Doug, Doug, you are very important! I will give you a lot of recommendations!” “Yes, I know Phil, but I am now testifying in court, and I’m ashamed of how I was. I don’t want this episode to be big and public. ”But Phil didn’t want to listen to the fact that I didn’t want to get involved with it. And so it went on for years."

Zimbardo confirmed that he made recommendations to Korpi, but refused to disclose the details.

STE made Zimbardo, arguably the most prominent living psychologist of America. He became the main author of one of the most popular and long-used textbooks, “Psychology: Basic Concepts” [Psychology: Core Concepts], and host of the 1990 television series on PBS “Discovering Psychology” [ Discovering Psychology ], which became extremely popular among high school and college students, and still appears on TV. And there and there talked about the experiment. But his popularity was not limited to the United States. The Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, who mentioned this experiment in the book " Modernity and the Holocaust"1989, was a typical example of the growing tradition in Eastern Europe and Germany to contact STE for an explanation of the phenomenon of the Holocaust. In an influential book in 1992, Ordinary People [Ordinary Men], historian Christopher Browning relied on both STE and the Milgram experiment , more one significant psychological experiment, arguing that the massacres committed by the fascists, in particular, were the result of situational factors (other scientists believe that people who followed the Nazi ideology and considered the Jews enemies of the state can hardly be be ordered "ordinary people").

In 2001, when Zimbardo was elected president of the American Psychological Society, the German-language film Das Experiment was released, based on SHE, but raising violence to a fascist level, in which the guards not only mistreated prisoners, but also killed them and each other. When in 2004 the information about torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison was made public, Zimbardo again walked through a talk show, arguing that the atrocities were not the result of the presence of several "bad" soldiers, but "the norm among them", and also gave expert evidence in the case of Aiv "Chip" Frederick, a senior sergeant, chief of the military policemen practicing torture. With the return of interest to the experiment, Zimbardo published in 2007 the book The Lucifer Effect, which contained even more details, though designed in such a way as not to question the basis of the discoveries. The book has become a national bestseller.

And all this time, experts have expressed doubts about the work of Zimbardo.



Despite the canonical status of STE in introductory psychology classes throughout the country, its methodological criticism was quick and widely distributed in the years following its implementation. Zimbardo and his students moved away from the scientific rules by publishing the first article about the experiment, not in the scientific journal on psychology, but in The New York Times Magazine, without passing the usual peer review. The famous psychologist Erich Frommwho did not know that the guards were specifically asked to be "more abruptly", nevertheless, suggested that in the light of the apparent cruelty coercion, the most surprising thing about this experiment was how few guards actually did it. “The authors believe that this proves that only one circumstance can, in a few days, turn normal people into submissive, humble personalities, or ruthless sadists,” wrote Fromm. “It seems to me that if this experiment proves, it’s just the opposite.” Some scientists argued that it was not an experiment at all. Leon Festinger , a psychologist, author of the concept of cognitive dissonance , generally called the incident " happing ".



The trick of criticism has been constantly nourished over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical problems related to its methodology — for example, the subconscious tendency of the subjects to conform to their idea of ​​the experiment [ demand characteristics ], the insufficient approximation of the experimental conditions to real [ ecological validity ] and systematic selection error . In 2005, Carlo Prescott, released on bail from San Quentin, who was the consultant on the study of the experiment, published an op-ed in The Stanford Daily newspaper entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment"revealing the fact that many torture techniques of prisoners were taken from his own experience in San Quentin, and not invented by the participants.

Another blow to the scientific star of the experiment was that Haslam and Reicher tried to reproduce the experiment in which no one guards instructed, and prisoners could stop participation at any time — and they did not manage to reproduce Zimbardo’s discoveries. The prisoners, instead of experiencing breakdowns due to increasing ill-treatment, united together, received additional privileges from the guards - the latter were becoming increasingly passive and intimidated.According to Reicher, Zimbardo was very uncomfortable with their attempt to publish their research in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

“We learned that he wrote to the editors of the magazine privately, trying to prevent us from publishing the work, and claimed that we were trying to deceive them,” Reicher told me.

Despite the intervention of Zimbardo, the magazine decided to publish an article by Reicher and Haslam, along with Zimbardo’s comments in which he wrote: “I think this so-called“ study of social psychology ”is fraudulent and does not deserve the approval of the community of social psychologists in Britain, the United States, or somewhere else, except in media psychology. ”

“In the end,” said Raicher, “we found that we are not participating in scientific debates. We were in commercial competition. At that moment, he really wanted to make a film in Hollywood. ”

Zimbardo’s long-term efforts to turn his work into a feature film finally bore fruit in 2015 in the form of the film “ The Stanford Prison Experiment ”, for which he was a consultant (in the film he plays Billy Crudup ). Although the film critically describes the experiment, it essentially supports the story of Zimbardo, and does not include encouraging guards to “cool treatment” with the prisoners during that Saturday’s meeting, and does not mention the role of David Jaff at all. The character, retired from Korpi (Ezra Miller), surrounded by cruel guards, begins to believe that he is not participating in the experiment, but is in a real prison, and during the emotional peak of the film, he experiences a nervous breakdown, which is expressed in a scream. His mania gradually infects other prisoners.

Somehow, neither Prescott’s letter, nor the failure of the experiment to replay, nor the many criticisms from scientists have so far been able to loosen the grip of Zimbardo’s history in the public mind. Appeals to SHE are related to something deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because he tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately believe in: that we, as individuals, cannot be held responsible for reprehensible actions, which we sometimes commit. Although it is unpleasant to accept the point of view of Zimbardo on fallen human nature, this feeling also frees at the same time. We are off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstances. Our penchant for error is situational. As the gospel promises to deliver us from sins, if only we believe, and so the teh offers us some form of redemption,specially created for the scientific era, which we readily accept.

For psychology teachers, SHE is a reliable way to appeal to the crowd, which they usually present along with a lot of unpleasant videos. In the auditoriums of the introductory psychology courses, often filled with students of other specialties, the intuition’s allegation that students ’faith in their inherent virtue is fundamentally wrong is clear evidence of the psychology’s ability to teach them something new and surprising . Some of the teachers I spoke with think that this helped convince students that people who do bad things are not always bad people. Others pointed out the importance of teaching students in our unusually individualistic culture that their actions are strongly influenced by external factors.

“Even if science was unusual,” said Kenneth Carter, a professor of psychology at Emory University, co-author of the textbook “Learning Psychology” [Learn Psychology], “or I somehow didn’t have the experiment, I think I still want so that my students think about the fact that they can find themselves in extremely influential situations that can change their behavior as individuals. This story is more than just science. ”

But if Zimbardo’s work was so unscientific, is it possible to trust the stories she is trying to tell? Many other studies, such as the famous Asha experimentdemonstrating how people ignore the evidence seen by their own eyes, for the sake of submitting to the majority opinion about the lengths of the segments, illustrate the serious effect that our environment can have on us. Much more methodologically reliable, although the controversial Milgram experiment demonstrates how inclined we are to submission in certain conditions. The uniqueness and unique appeal of Zimbardo’s story about STE is in its assumption that to turn us into sadistic enthusiasts, all that is needed is that the jumpsuit, the stick and the permission to dominate the same kind of people.



“This just makes my head spin,” explained Le Texier. “It's like,“ Oh my goodness, I could be a fascist. ” I thought I was a good guy, and now I find out that I could be such a monster. " And at the same time it is reassuring, because if I become a monster, it is not due to the fact that deep down I am bad, but because of the situation. I think this is why this experiment was so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. No guilt feelings. “Well, okay, such was the situation. We are all good. No problem.Just the situation made us go for it. " So it is shocking, but also soothing. I think these two messages of the experiment made him famous. ”

In the 2014 and 2015 surveys, Richard Griggs and Jared Bartels found that in almost all the textbooks on the introduction to psychology there is an uncritical description of the Zimbardo experiment. I wondered why the selected experts in this field, probably well-informed about the dubious history of the experiment, decided, nevertheless, to include it in the textbook, and I contacted some of them. Three told me that at first, in the first editions, they did not mention SHE, due to concerns about its scientific nature. But even psychology professors cannot resist the forces of social influence: two added it under the pressure of experts and teachers, and the third because it was so often spoken about in the news after Abu Ghraib. Other authors I interviewed expressed a more critical attitude toward the experiment, compared towhat was written in their books, suggesting, however, many reasons why they still have pedagogical value.

Greg Feist, co-author of the Psychology: Perspectives and Connections textbook [Psychology: Perspectives and Connections] told me that his personal view of the experiment changed several years ago when he came across the 2005 op-ed Carlo Prescott, and which he described, as "shocking."

“As soon as I discovered the existence of ethical and scientific problems in this study, I honestly decided that it was not worth perpetuating,” Feist said.

But, nevertheless, here it is, in the third edition of his textbook, published in 2014: a detailed, generally accepted statement of the standard history of Zimbardo, with brief criticism, which appears only later in this chapter.



On October 25, 1971, two months after the completion of the experiment so intense for Philip Zimbardo, that he lost five kilograms in a week, he went to Washington DC at the request of the US House Judicial Committee [supervises the work of courts, administrative agencies and federal law enforcement agencies / approx. trans.].In the hearing room, Zimbardo sat in front of the assembled congressmen of Subcommittee No. 3 and told the greatest lie: that the “guards” in his recent experiment “just told that they would fall into a situation that could take a serious turn and become a little dangerous ... They themselves set the rules for support of law, order and respect. " Zimbardo described a long list of atrocities that led to "acute situational traumatic reactions" in prisoners. Despite the fact that he never visited a real prison, he easily summarized the results of his research, which was not checked by experts, no one published, and no one, by and large, did not analyze: “The situation with prisons in our country is guaranteed to cause serious pathological reactions in the guards and prisoners, demeaning their humanity,diminishing their self-esteem, complicating their return to the community outside the prison. ” Zimbardo became a hit. A spokesman for Hamilton Fish from New York described it this way: "You definitely helped me clarify some of the events that we have seen in the past few days and understand them."

In the footsteps of prison riots in San Quentin and Attica, Zimbardo’s message fit perfectly on the national spirit of the times. The criticism of the criminal justice system, which transferred the accusations simultaneously from prisoners and guards to a certain “situation” that was so vaguely defined that it could approach almost any topic, offered anyone a seductive way to examine the social problems of modernity under a microscope. Reform-oriented liberals craved evidence that people who committed crimes acted so influenced by the environment in which they were born, which supported their view of the need for systematic reform to reduce the number of crimes in cities — the continuation of Johnson’s “ war on poverty ” - not the " war on crime""which was advertised in his election campaign by Richard Nixon." When I heard about this study, recalls Francis Cullen, one of the most prominent forensic scientists of the last half a century, I thought, "Of course, this is true." I reacted uncritically. All reacted uncritical. "In the area of ​​Cullen's activities, SHE provided convenient evidence of the fundamental inoperability of the prison system." This confirmed what people believed in - that prisons are inherently inhuman, "he said.

The racial dynamics of SHE, which have never been adequately studied, could delay reformers. Carlo Prescott, who had recently undergone sixteen years of imprisonment, being black, played a crucial role in building the architecture of the experiment. Frustrated by the lack of black subjects, he constantly intervened in the process, trying to bring, as he told me, “the spirit of authenticity to the guys who were paid $ 15 a day to play prisoners - they were all white, if you remember (ed. - one of the prisoners was still an Asian). One of the most shocking things, after your freedom was taken away, is that you will be controlled by people who already hate you. ” However, from the description of the "situation" that gives rise to cruelty, Zimbardo completely excluded the racial question.He usually used the word “normal” to describe the participants, despite the fact that they could hardly be considered normal representatives of the prisoner environment at that time. Analysis of cruelty towards prisoners as a product of “situational forces” that do not discriminate between the race eliminated its deep roots stemming from racial oppression.

However, as a result, SHE had a significant impact on American criminology. The first scientific article of Zimbardo about his results was published in the International Journal of Criminology and Penology [International Journal of Criminology and Penology], and not in the psychological edition. A year later, Robert Martinson, from a team of sociologists appointed by the state of New York to evaluate various prison programs, spoke on the program “ 60 minutes“with a grim message: nothing works in the field of rehabilitating prisoners. Almost instantly, the Martinson’s“ disability doctrine ”became generally accepted in America. She is often quoted as the reason for the widespread rejection in the 1970s among scientists and policy-makers of . that the prison can be a rehabilitation center Cullen believes that this played a role and Zimbardo study.

"Stanford prison experiment - says Cullen, - says prison does not reform the main problem people meters. ozhestva prison reforms, especially among academic criminologists, is that prisons are inherently inhumane, and we were in favor of minimizing the use of prisons, focused on alternatives to the public correction. "

In an era of rapidly growing numbers of crimes, such an agenda turned out to be politically untenable. Conservative politicians did not hesitate to use imprisonment solely to punish people, plunged into the decades-long era of "crackdown" that disproportionately affected black Americans. The number of cases of imprisonment has steadily increased, and now is five times higher than statistics in comparable countries: every third black in America will necessarily go to prison.

Of course, it would be unfair to blame Zimbardo alone for the mass imprisonment of people. It will be more accurate to say that SHE, with its reformist ideas, divided the opinions of its time into two camps. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Cullen and his colleagues Theresa Kulig and Travis Pratt, 95% of the many criminological works that referred to TES for all the years adhered to his main message that prisons are inherently inhuman.

“Later, I was amazed at how we all lost our scientific skepticism,” says Cullen. - We hit the ideology in the manner of people who deny climate change. The studies of Zimbardo and Martinson fit so well on intuition that no one took a step back and said: “Well, in principle, this may turn out to be incorrect.”

Most of today's forensic scientists agree that prisons are not as hopeless as Zimbardo and Martinson have described. Some prison programs reliably help prisoners improve their lives. And, although it is rather difficult to compare different countries, the Norwegian high-security prison Halden, where convicted murderers wear ordinary clothes, gain working skills, dine with unarmed guards, and is free to walk around beautiful places all day, among pines and blueberry bushes, serves a certain hope Norwegian prisoners rarely engage in fights, and commit repeated offenses less often than anywhere else. To begin improving all the shortcomings of mass imprisonment, Cullen argues, it is necessary to examine the question of what makes some prison management systems better than others, instead ofjust to throw away all prisons, as inherently cruel, as did the shes.

In the meantime, the legacy of Zimbardo’s work extends much further than our problematic criminal justice system, and directly concerns how we understand our personal moral freedom. On a



sunny August noon in 2006, at the peak of the Iraq war, 19-year-old United States Army ranger Alex Bloom drove a car with three other rangers to the Bank of America branch in Tacoma. They jumped out of the car, and with the help of pistols and Kalashnikovs committed robbery. Three days later, Alex, who, by chance, was also my cousin, was arrested in our hometown of Denver, pc. Colorado. Alex explained to our family that he thought he was participating in a training exercise. After a radical monthly training as part of the Ranger training program he recently completed, he followed his commander without asking questions. At the hearing of Alex’s case, his lawyers invited a prominent expert to prove that he had participated in the robbery, not of his own free will, but under the influence of “situational influence”. The expert was Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Alex was sentenced to an incredibly mild punishment, and Zimbardo became the hero of the family.

In October 2010, Zimbardo participated in a special episode of the talk show Dr. Phil titled “When good people do bad things,” using Alex's story to tell you that bad actions are the result of circumstances, not character or choice. From my seat in the studio stands, I listened to Zimbardo describing the bullying of prison guards, to whom no one had ever incited them. “I restricted the guards to the requirement not to use physical impact, but they intuitively knew how to act psychologically,” he said. He then used his theories to explain the torture in Abu Ghraib, giving the same arguments that he used to defend Ivan Frederick. When Dr. Phil asked the audience who among them believed that in a similar situation he would also torture prisoners,my whole family got up - and almost no one else did. We proudly supported Alex, and we knew that this very lesson should be learned from Zimbardo.

A few years later, having decided to write a book about Alex, I found evidence that he did not tell me the whole truth about his participation in that matter. When I asked him directly in the face, he admitted that his choice to participate in the robbery was more free and informed than he had made clear earlier. Taking responsibility has changed him. This freed him from the feeling of the offended sacrifice he had been experiencing for years. “Situational Impact” Zimbardo once seemed to allow my cousin to believe that, in fact, he was a good man, despite the flagrant crime he had committed, but seeing his personal growth after a moral reassessment of the situation, I became interested, but whether he benefited from it.

And after I interviewed Zimbardo at his home in San Francisco for my book about Alex, I began to study the story of his famous experiment more deeply. The more I found, the more my uncertainty grew. Shortly after the publication of my book, I, by that time having already talked with several former participants in the experiment, asked Zimbardo about another interview. For several months I did not receive a response from him. Then Le Texier's book came out, and Zimbardo suddenly agreed to talk to me, apparently eager to answer the charges. We talked on Skype shortly after he returned from a conference on psychology. His office was packed with books and papers, and the phone constantly rang somewhere in the background while we were talking.

For years, listening to Zimbardo's stories about his experiment, I did not expect to hear something new. The first surprise came when I asked him about the statements of Korpi and Yakko who claimed that they were told that they could not leave. After discarding these allegations as false, and stating that Korpi and Yakko simply forgot the safe phrase “I leave the experiment,” Zimbardo struck me, admitting that he actually asked his assistants to tell the prisoners that they could not leave .

"If the prisoner said," I want to leave, "and you tell him," Ok, "then after they leave, the experiment will end," Zimbardo explained. “All the prisoners would just say,“ I want to leave. ” So that they do not leave, there must be some reason. In their head there should be a representation “I am imprisoned”, and not “I am a college student in an experiment. I don't want to get my money, I leave the experiment. ” You cannot leave prison. This is the whole essence of the Pirandelian Prison (approx. Ed.: Pirandello, Luigi - Italian playwright, whose plays combined reality with fiction). At some level you are a student in the basement, participating in an experiment. On another level, you are a prisoner who is tortured by guards in the county jail. "

Zimbardo confirmed that David Jaff was developing rules of conduct with the guards, but he tried to claim that he did not lie when he told Congress (and many years later insisted in a dispute with Leslie Stol in the 60 minutes show, that the guards invented the rules on their own, because Zimbardo That moment was not. He downloaded denied the existence of any political motives for the experiment, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release distributed on the second day of the experiment, which explicitly stated that it was aimed at treatment of attention to the need for reform, he admitted that he probably wrote his own, under the pressure of Carlo Prescott, with whom he co-led the class of the Summer School on the conclusion of psychology.

“During that course, I began to see that prisons are a waste of time, money and lives,” said Zimbardo. - So yes, I am a social activist, and prison reform has always been important to me. This was not the reason for the study. ”

At the end of a long and tense conversation, I asked him if he thought that Le Texier’s book would change how people envision this experiment.

“I don't know,” he said wearily. - In a sense, I do not care. At this stage, the problem is that I don’t want to waste my time anymore. People can say anything about it. This is the most important research in the history of psychology at the moment. There are no studies that people would talk about 50 years later. Ordinary people know about him. They say: "What are you doing?" "I am a psychologist." This may be a taxi driver in Budapest, the owner of a restaurant in Poland. I say that I am a psychologist, and they say: “Have you heard about this study?” It already lives by itself. If he wants to call him a hoax, that's his business. I'm not going to defend him anymore. His defense is his durability. ”

Zimbardo spent most of the last fifty years, answering questions about the darkest six days of his life, in a sense becoming a prisoner of the success of his own experiment. When I asked if he was glad, looking back, that he had conducted this study, he says that he has mixed feelings. His most important work he considers the clinic shyness, located in Palo Alto, founded by him in 1975.

“If it were not for this study with a prison, then this would be my legacy,” he said.

“Would any part of you like this to be your legacy?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said. - Naturally. This is something positive. In the study of the prison minus is that I was a doctor Evil. I created this unkind situation, like some Svengali . ”

According to Zimbardo, he himself became a victim of circumstances - yielding to his entourage, like everyone else.

“I gradually, without realizing it, turned myself into a prison superintendent,” he said. - Why?In my office there was a sign "Superintendent of Prison". At the office of David Jaff - "Warden". And then I had to deal with my parents. With parole hearings. With the priest who came to us. People turn to me not as a researcher, but as a prison superintendent, and ask for help with their son, who is in prison. ”

This excuse has served Zimbardo well and everything else all these years, but it may not be enough. After examining some of the evidence of Le Texier, the author of the textbooks, Greg Feist, told me that he was considering the possibility of taking a firmer position when publishing the next edition of the textbook Psychology: Prospects and Relationships.

“Having learned what we learned, I hope that the moment will come when Zimbardo’s story will perish,” said Feist. Unfortunately, this will not happen soon, but I hope that will happen. Because I think this is ... ”

Feist interrupted in search of a suitable word, and then decided to stop at a simple version.

"It's a lie".