The Stanford Prison Experiment was one of the most notorious psychology experiments of the last 50 years.
In 1971, Stanford psychology professor Dr. Philip Zimbardo gathered a group of college students to take part in a study about life in prison. He paid them $15 a day and divided them into two groups: prisoners and guards. The study was supposed to take two weeks, but after just six days, the guards became increasingly worse toward the prisoners, and the experiment was halted.
Over the next few decades, Dr. Zimbardo became infamous, staying in the spotlight and making media appearances discussing the study, speaking at length about how good people can do bad things and the brutality of prison life.
But what of the participants? Did they feel the same way about the study as Dr. Zimbardo?
For the first time, the guards and prisoners are breaking their 50-year silence through a new NatGeo docuseries called The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth in which they discuss and recreate pivotal moments from the experiment. The series takes a look at all angles of the experiment and challenges the narrative built by Dr. Zimbardo after all these years.
One such participant is Clay Ramsay, or Prisoner 416, who is most known for initiating a hunger strike while “behind bars.” Below, he reflects on his experiences during the study, offering a perspective not often discussed regarding the ethics of the study and the inherent power manipulation therein.
I know you were not one of the original participants. You were an alternate, if you will. What were your expectations going into the experiment and do you think you were fully aware of what you were getting yourself into?
Clay Ramsay: No one was fully aware, and I was not fully aware. I had assumed that this would be, to some degree, like other psychology experiments I had participated in. In the Stanford environment, there were always ads up for different kinds of experiment participation – not ones that lasted two weeks – but in any case, no, I was shocked from the point that I was stripped and pseudo de-loused using baking powder.
When you joined, there was already an air of rebellion against the guards regarding their treatment of the prisoners. You pretty famously even started your own rebellion in the form of a hunger strike. Tell me a little more about the catalyst behind that decision.
Ramsay: Actually, there wasn’t an air of rebellion at that point. That was something that happened at the end of the first day or sometime on the second day, and it had been pretty much quashed. So I wasn’t there for all that, but that’s the point at which the guards really got tested, and they succeeded in pushing people back into place. When I got there, the prisoners were pretty subdued. It took me easily a day and a half to decide whether this thing was even really an experiment or not, whether it was at all legit. It took me a while, but at the point that I decided I would do a hunger strike, there really wasn’t any other kind of activity like that going on.
Zimbardo said the other prisoners viewed you as a troublemaker for that decision. Do you think that’s a fair judgment? Did you see that play out in their attitudes toward you, or did you see yourself as a hero?
Ramsay: First of all, my judgment is very limited about that, because part of the time I was in the janitor’s closet, so I couldn’t tell. I know that the guards felt they had to find a way to get control, and so they looked for ways to inconvenience the other prisoners, to create some kind of social pressure on me to do things differently. But the guards’ pressure on the other prisoners was so coercive that it wasn’t convincing that they were mad at me. So I would have to disagree with the late Dr. Zimbardo on that.
Do you think anything would have played out differently had anyone else joined you?
Ramsay: Oh, I think we would have been repressed more if somebody had joined me. I think it was perhaps more effective for me to do it by myself, actually. I don’t know what they would have done at that point, but it’s not like it would have made the difference for a second person to join me.
What do you think this says about solidarity vs. individual resistance?
Ramsay: You have to understand that I have said for 50 years that this study has no scientific value whatsoever. I have been shown to be right by the book [Investigating the Stanford Prison Experiment: History of a Lie] by Thibault Le Texier. He unearthed like 100 times more information than was available to me until his book appeared. But really, this [experiment] is not something that tells anyone anything about human behavior. That’s my position.
I was reading about another documentary called Quiet Rage that y’all did with Zimbardo two months after the experiment and that you felt – even for the short amount of time you participated – like you were losing your identity. How did that affect you then, and how much of that has stayed with you in adulthood?
Ramsay: My memory is imperfect, but in terms of the time interval, that makes sense. And if I’m on record having said that I felt I was losing my identity, then I guess there’s something to that. But one would expect some lasting after-effects if that were the case, and that just really wasn’t true. You have to remember, this was the Bay Area in 1971. People talked dramatically, people threw things around, people did gonzo behavior of all sorts, and Zimbardo’s experiment was really part of that atmosphere within Stanford. There was a lot of “everything and anything goes.”
What does being a part of such a historically significant study mean to you? I have two cousins who were psychology students and they knew exactly what the study was when I mentioned I was talking to you, and that’s even 50 years after the fact!
Ramsay: Well, I have been in a position of having said over and over that this is bad science, right? And that has not been of much interest to journalism decade after decade. And I don’t expect that part to change. However, at least now, my position has been justified at the level of articles in American psychological journals and so forth.
Have you maintained relationships with any of the other participants and if so, what does that look like?
Ramsay: We were brought together in the course of doing this very documentary. Juliette Eisner, the director, gets all the credit for that, along with Alex Braverman, the producer. Throughout this, [Juliette] has been extremely intelligent, sensitive, and attentive, sort of 360-degree documentary maker. I felt that I got to tell my story. You’ll see in episode three that Zimbardo got to tell his story. So in the course of that, yes, I would say thanks to Juliette Eisner, there are some connections. Zimbardo would try to bring together participants in one venue or another, but I was not a part of that, and he was not trying to get me into that.
You’ve said you don’t think the experiment was sound science. How did the constant surveillance and lack of control and agency throughout the experiment affect you?
Ramsay: It affected me in the desire to see what I could do to get out! The idea that I lost my identity boundaries is, I think, disproven by my ability to come up with a strategy and execute it. And I would say that also, of other prisoners and guards, that two-thirds of the guards were not like Dave. [Note: Dave Eshelman was an acting student who patterned his behavior after the movie Cool Hand Luke. Those in the experiment called him John Wayne.] They didn’t have acting training and they weren’t getting nudged along by Zimbardo in the same way. And so two-thirds of them were basically “live and let live” in the experiment. So they made their decision, and they followed it. Some of the prisoners felt like “This is my late summer job, and I kind of want the two weeks’ worth of money, and so maybe this will calm down soon.” So they were willing to put up with a fair amount because they knew this wasn’t permanent. That it was not a prison. There was one person who, before I was there, had the signs of a nervous breakdown, and he has said later that he chose to fake it. That this was his exit, right? And it’s possible – and I’m only speculating, I’m probably doing him a disservice – that it was a bit of a mix. That he began trying to fake it, and then he realized, you know, I really do feel terrible. I gotta get out of here.
We’ve kind of touched on this, but how did the participation in the study help you reflect on human psychology, and what did it reveal about human nature to you?
Ramsay: It didn’t help me reflect on human psychology. First of all, right after this, I started UC Santa Cruz. So I was not only occupied, I was thoroughly entertained by UC Santa Cruz. I’m not spending my time going out into the hills and pondering the experiment. But there was a point, maybe a year later, where I thought, maybe I can get something out of this. Maybe I could write something and get it printed somewhere. And I started on it, but I ran out of gas because I found all I had to say was that the main motivation for the prisoners was that this was a job. And that wasn’t very interesting to me or others. So I dropped it.
This documentary shows all sides of the experiment and even casts some doubt on Zimbardo’s credibility and ethics during the experiment through Thibault Le Texier’s book. Has your opinion of Zimbardo changed throughout the years and if so, how?
Ramsay: No, what Thibault did was confirm my existing opinion of Zimbardo, which is that he was basically a public relations man. That was his real skill. He nursed this thing and made it a cultural object and it now will never go away. And all that we’ve got now is that there’s a dissenting opinion that’s in the public record, instead of it being just a thing that floats around occasionally. What Thibault showed me in his book – which is now in English, by the way – was a huge amount of information that was new to me. I had thought that however badly this was done, at least some kind of design, research, or design on paper. That wasn’t the case. What Zimbardo had instead was the work of one of his students who had the original idea. And they did this by renting three hotel rooms in South Palo Alto somewhere for a long weekend, and that it would be a quick [experiment]. That was their student activity. And then this was presented to Zimbardo, and he went, “This is great. I have access to lots of credit for this. And I have access to lots of funds.” Which is true. And Thibault’s book outlines how that worked at Stanford at the time. And so he just went about taking over the basement of the department, built what he needed, put the cameras in, and he was ready to roll. There was nothing else on paper, except afterward.
The book is fascinating to me. I’m in grad school and I’m taking a Research Methods class where we go over all the steps you have to take to conduct an experiment, so it surprises me that he could bypass that.
Ramsay: Yeah, that’s a lot of the charm. That’s a lot of what makes it a story. After his experiment, there was a decision by the American Psychological Association to have institutional review boards in place for human subjects in psychology experiments instead of only medical experiments, which had been the case before. So after Zimbardo, there were no other splashy-looking, career-making experiments like this, right?
And he was able to keep it in the zeitgeist and we’re still talking about it 50 years later.
Ramsay: That was his skill. That’s what he was really good at.
Lastly, in this documentary, you mentioned that you wanted to write a book on acid use in California and felt like being a participant would give you time to work on it. Did you ever get to write your book?
Ramsay: I did write it. I’ve just never published it. It’s a novel called Within California. It’s a little dense, but it’s more of a sort of slight fantasy alternate California. But all the elements about acid use are from the sort of the Golden Age, which was 1966 to when I finished it in 1973.
The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth is now streaming on Disney+.
