2015 is a banner year for films about social psychology, although it may also demonstrate that such films are not readily marketable to a mass audience.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, depicts the 1971 study by Philip Zimbardo in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned to the roles of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The study, scheduled for two weeks, was discontinued after six days. It demonstrated that when people are given absolute power over others, they behave badly, endangering the mental health and physical safety of those in their charge. Zimbardo has noted similarities between the simulation and conditions in real prisons, as well as the behavior of American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
By coincidence, The Stanford Prison Experiment was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. Also shown at Sundance was Experimenter, an account of Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. Not only are these the two best known examples of research in social psychology, they both have a similar message—that antisocial behavior that the public normally attributes to individual differences in personality is actually a predictable effect of the immediate social situation.
Phil Zimbardo served as a technical advisor to the film, supplying the filmmakers with videotapes of the experiment and other documentation. The film stands in contrast to the 2001 German film, Das Experiment, a fictional drama based on the Stanford prison experiment. At the time of its release, Zimbardo took strong exception to the way he and his study were portrayed. (There is also an obscure 2010 American film, The Experiment, with Adrien Brody and Forrest Whitaker, which is apparently a remake of Das Experiment. I haven’t seen it.)
The Stanford Prison Experiment escaped my notice until I read a favorable, but not enthusiastic, review by Max Nelson in Film Comment. Nelson praises it for its realism and its attention to details of the language and style of the period. He notes that the fact that it was almost all filmed on a single set gives it “tense, visceral power.” Given Zimbardo’s involvement in the production, he also makes two surprising claims. Zimbardo, he says, is portrayed by actor Billy Crudup as a “monomaniac.” He also says the film is “not entirely factual,” although he doesn’t explain why.
The film opened quietly on July 17 on only two screens and took in a disappointing $37,500 in its first weekend. It hasn’t been shown in Pittsburgh. No word yet on when it will be released on DVD.
As part of the advance publicity for the film, Phil Zimbardo did this half-hour interview with the Huffington Post. A good source of information about the Stanford Prison study and its real world applications is Zimbardo’s 2007 book The Lucifer Effect.
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