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March 28, 2025 - Lionel Nation
17:15
The Stanford Prison Experiment: How the Lucifer Effect Turned Students Into Sadistic Monsters
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Everybody who is a student of politics, human behavior, what is going on in the world, anybody who considers themselves to be an astute Student of reality must know the Stanford Prison Experiment.
It's a follow-up to the Milgram Experiment, which we've already done, which I commend to you to go back and watch this.
But this is critical because it goes back and it fulfills and attempts to satiate one of the areas of my fascination, and that is in the area of psychopathy, And the ability to exact torture and pain and horror on the part of innocent people when directed to do so.
How do people do this?
How can seemingly ordinary people kill and drop bombs and maim and do all of these horrors?
So, this is a follow-up.
If you had to give this kind of a Keith Morrison feel, you know, you would call it maybe the basement below, the Stanford prison experiment, and the science of darkness.
And that wouldn't be much of an exaggeration.
So, where does this happen?
Well, in 1971, 1971.
A decade after the Milgram experiment.
In the summer of 71, deep in the basement of Stanford University's psychology department, there was a group of young men unknowingly and unwittingly who stepped into a nightmare.
They thought they were volunteering for a harmless behavioral study.
Be on the lookout whenever they tell you it's a harmless little study.
Watch out!
Instead, they became part of one of the most infamous and terrifying experiments in all of modern history.
Oh, this is a beaut.
What unfolded in that dark and dank and kind of windowless space kind of reminds me of the psych department I had.
It was almost like a bomb shelter.
No sign of life.
Sterile beyond sterile.
Sterile would be a compliment.
But in this windowless kind of a bunker, it was not just a study, it was a descent, and I'm not exaggerating, into the sick psychology and psychopathology of unchecked power and obedience and dehumanization.
You think I'm exaggerating?
I know you.
I don't blame you.
The psychologist was Dr. Philip Zimbardo.
He just died in I think October or so of last year.
Very interesting guy.
Very charismatic, respected figure in social psychology.
And he sought to build on the revelations of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment from a decade earlier, which we talked about.
Milgram, as you remember, had revealed how ordinary people And please go back and see my...
I keep telling you this like you're stupid.
Anyway, he wanted to see how ordinary people could be convinced, not forced, but just kind of persuaded to administer what appear to be deadly shocks under the guise of authority.
You know, do it for science, or do it because this guy with the code is telling you.
So Zimbardo wanted to go a little deeper.
He wanted to create a simulation.
That would reveal how people adapt to the roles of power and submission.
It's a little different, okay?
I don't know how to use sick people getting turned on by this.
And that's not the intent of this.
But draw your own corollaries.
He turned a university basement into a mock prison, complete with barred windows, solitary confinement cells, surveillance equipment.
Twenty-four psychologically stable, ordinary college kids, students, were selected and randomly assigned roles of either prisoner or guard.
It was supposed to last two weeks.
It didn't even make it to day seven.
What began, it's kind of an awkward role-play, cosplay, so to speak, quickly Just went off the rails, spiraled into something that was even more sinister.
The students playing the guards embraced their roles with chilling speed.
This is 1971.
You know, Vietnam's still going on and supposedly, hey, you know, long hair and peace and love and authoritarian.
Not these people.
No!
They adapted immediately.
They invented punishment, invented punishment, enforced dehumanizing rituals.
Think Abu Ghraib, think Lindy England.
And they began to psychologically torture the prisoners who were just before fellow students, maybe friends.
Some forced inmates to perform humiliating acts.
Others deprived them of sleep.
One guard, nicknamed John Wayne by the others, Became particularly brutal.
Really brutal.
Donning mirrored sunglasses and the adopting of a southern accent.
Kind of like Cool Hand Luke.
Remember that guy with the glasses?
And also remember, whenever you have glasses, you separate yourself from the person.
No eye contact.
Separate yourself from the victim.
He donned this kind of a southern affectation.
He strutted through the prison like some...
Caricature of some boss hog authoritarian cruelty or whatever it was.
Now the prisoners, meanwhile, began to break down.
They cried.
They raged.
They went nuts.
Some went catatonic.
They pleaded for release.
This is an experiment.
Their sense of identity began to dissolve.
It disappeared.
They were stripped of names, dressed in smocks with numbers.
They no longer felt Like students or volunteers, they felt like inmates, like they were just rats, you know, in some maze.
And the guards, they weren't pretending anymore.
They had become their roles without any, they weren't told to do any of this.
They just did it.
Now Zimbardo was acting as a prison superintendent.
He didn't stop it.
At least not until it was nearly too late.
Caught some grief later.
Before that, the experiment was only halted when a graduate student, Zimbardo's then-girlfriend, Christina Maslach, walked into the basement and recoiled in what she described as horror.
She said, what are you doing?
This is unethical.
These aren't prisoners.
These are students.
And you are responsible.
I think a story about him.
He kind of, and then he went a little off the rails there.
Only then didn't Zimbardo pull the plug.
He figured, Milgram be damned.
That was just, he didn't even instruct these people.
They just did it.
The fallout was immediate.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, the SPE, shocked the public.
Riveted.
Just set the shockwaves.
Always a shockwaves through academia.
And it became a cornerstone example.
In psych classes, for decades to come, it raised very serious questions that still haunt us.
How quickly do we lose our humanity when given power over others?
Remember, Milgram was you following orders, but you're on your own.
Imagine if Milgram went around the screen and started slapping the people around.
Hooking up alligator clips to their nipples attached to a Ford Bronco.
I'm sorry, I kind of got lost there.
But the question is, how fragile is the moral compass of the average person?
Morality.
Could a functional society turn dystopian and psychopathic overnight?
Could it?
This is incredible.
The experiment became a mirror.
And the image it reflected was...
Unbelievable.
Zimbardo later wrote that the study revealed a phenomenon he called, I love this, check this out, the Lucifer Effect.
The Lucifer Effect, where the process by which ordinary people can become perpetrators of evil when placed in systems that normalize and encourage abuse.
The Lucifer Effect.
It wasn't that the guards were inherently sadistic.
It was that the system itself made cruelty permissible, even expected.
So their individual morality didn't override it.
So the lessons of SPE, the Stanford Prison Experiment, echoed through time like a warning.
Abu Ghraib.
American soldiers became the guards.
Detainees became the prisoners.
The photos told the story.
Hooded men forced into humiliation, psychological and physical torment.
Remember how...
I can't say it right now for YouTube purposes, but you know what they did.
All under the banner of authority and national security.
And Zimbardo himself drew the connection, testifying at courts-martial and cautioning...
That what happened in Iraq wasn't some freak accident, but a system failure.
If the system brought this out, it encouraged it and inspired it.
A psychological blueprint repeating itself.
In that way, the Stanford prison experiment is really less a relic and more a prophecy.
It showed how easy it is to construct a false reality.
I don't know, so persuasive, maybe, that people abandon their own morality.
You know, they just, they walk into the door, I'm in!
It illustrated how we are all susceptible to role-based manipulation, given the right conditions.
Even you!
Uniforms, institutional backing, patriotism, badges, a flag, you're supposed to do this.
And the sense that this is just how things are done.
The experiment also caused a fierce ethical debate.
Many people were arguing that it should never have been allowed in the first place, and the trauma experienced by these participants was real.
One of the prisoners, known only by his number 8612, began to scream in confusion and rage, only to be told he couldn't leave.
You can't quit, they said.
Even though legally he could.
And that moment, that moment, that one instance became emblematic of the power of psychological imprisonment.
When the mind is tricked into believing it has no escape.
Learned helplessness.
How many times have I told you about that?
And despite the controversy, Zimbardo defended his work.
He argued that, look, it revealed the truth.
That is too easy to ignore and too important not to ignore.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has never truly gone away.
It resurfaces in every scandal involving institutional abuse from corrupt police rituals and fraternities and toxic work environments where managers rule maybe through fear and degradation.
I mean, we've seen this.
Institutions, offices, and schools everywhere.
And it also begs the question, what would you do?
What would you do?
What would you become if you were given a badge, a baton, and the authority to punish?
And were expected to do it.
Would you resist?
Would your sense of morality...
Outweigh this?
Overpower it?
Would it be almost like a kill switch?
Or would you find yourself inventing rules, meting out punishments, exacting punishments, rationalizing cruelty as some kind of procedure?
I have to do it.
It's the rules.
The Stanford Prison Experiment wasn't just about students in a basement.
It was a dark test of human nature.
It was a simulation that Reveal to people how thin this line, this firewall, this veneer of civilization can be when we're handed power without oversight, without rules, without accountability, without somebody watching over us.
And when there are systems with no compassion or systems that don't encourage, maybe dissuade you from compassion.
And maybe the most chilling part of all this?
The experiment didn't fail.
It succeeded.
It succeeded.
Terrifyingly so, it succeeded.
It proved that beneath the surface of polite society and we're all God-fearing and loving and we're all inherently giving and loving, there's this primal, atavistic, animalistic susceptibility to authoritarianism.
That is what it's about.
That even in the heart of Academia at Stanford in 1971, you know, surrounded by books and theory and, you know, the mind can twist itself into becoming something that is absolutely unrecognizable.
They walked into the basement as students, right?
And they left as like cautionary tales.
Don't let this happen.
And the world, the world above that, you know, basement would never be the same.
This is really what you've got to study.
This is what it's about.
The SPE, the Lucifer effect.
Think about this with my friends.
What would you do?
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Have a great and a glorious day.
And by the way, in this section here, I want to hear your thoughts and comments as you comment.
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