A well-known staple of Psych 101 textbooks, the 1971 exercise depicted in the film The Stanford Prison Experiment also has plenty of detractors in the field. As a docudrama, the film contains very good acting and, if you don’t bother to think about it too much, can seem quite the provocative conversation catalyst.
Philip Zambrano (a fine Billy Cruddup), a psychologist at Stanford, whips up a summer project using student applicants, who he paid $15 a day. Quickly screened to attempt to weed out the psychologically damaged, the 21 subjects are then randomly split into inmates and guards to simulate a real prison experience for two weeks. College corridors and classrooms, empty for the summer, we’re transfixed into cells and there was even a solitary confinement “hole.” The guards adopt uniforms including sunglasses and wield billy clubs; the inmates wear smocks containing their ID numbers, chains around their ankles, and stocking-like caps. Zimbardo gets local police to lend a hand by simulating actual arrests, and the inmates are handcuffed, searched, blindfolded, and then stripped and “de-loused” on their way to their cells.
Once interaction begins , the guards, especially a taunting self-described Cool Hand Luke-inspired Strother Martin-like Chris (Michael Angarano), begin to get nasty and abusive. Inmates at first endure it, but eventually rebel. The “no physical violence” rule instituted by Zimbrano is quickly ignored and the whole experiment threatens to spin out of control. Meanwhile, Zimbrano, who along with a couple of assistants maintains surveillance, expresses not wanting to intervene but to “let things play out.”
The problem with such an experiment is the variable of participants’ guessing which behaviors researchers are expecting. These expectations are known in the research field as “demand characteristics.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that subjects put into this environment would likely respond the way the guys in Zimbrano’s “prison” did. Thus, this wacky experiment may have a seemingly compelling and luridly dramatic arc to it, but it’s offset by flawed science. Zambrano’s experiment over time has become notorious as a classic example of how not to conduct such a study.
Furthermore, as good as Ezra Miller and Tye Sheridan are in portraying two of the inmates who begin to suffer trauma to the point of desperately wishing to opt out of the experiment, their characters suffer from existing largely on the surface. With no back stories and little self-contemplation depicted, next to nothing is known about the origin of their motivations. There’s plenty of gripping cheap thrills in The Stanford Prison Experiement, but little emotional bite–a so-so approach for a film about a psychological study. An ex-con (Nalson Ellis) hired by Zambrano as a “professional consultant” has an epiphany regarding his imitating the very behavior he had come to despise while a prisoner himself. It’s a jolting reminder that director Kyle Patrick Alvarez and screenwriter Tim Talbott have the rest of this film’s characters’ inner lives in lock-down.