18 May 2026 13 min read

Fringe science

Philip Zimbardo rose to fame because of his Stanford Prison experiment, but long before this, Zimbardo was fascinated by William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies which gave a depiction of normal, well-mannered schoolboys rapidly descending into savagery once their individual identities were masked by war paint and societal rules disappeared. In the novel, during an unnamed nuclear war, a British plane evacuating a group of school boys crashes on a deserted tropical island. No adults survive. Two older boys emerge as leaders: Ralph, who is charismatic and rational, and Jack, the aggressive head of a choir group. Ralph is elected chief. He uses a conch shell as a symbol of democracy—whoever holds it has the right to speak. They build shelters and light a signal fire on a mountain to attract rescue ships. Rumours spread among the younger boys ("littluns") about a terrifying "Beast" lurking on the island. While Ralph focuses on maintaining the fire and building shelters, Jack forms a band of hunters to track wild pigs. Jack uses the growing fear of the Beast to manipulate the boys, offering them meat and protection. The group splits. Jack forms a savage, tribal cult based on hunting, face paint, and ritualistic dances. He abandons the signal fire, causing a passing ship to miss them. A mystical, prophetic boy named Simon discovers that the "Beast" is actually the rotting corpse of a pilot who parachuted onto the island. Before he can tell the others, Simon encounters a pig's head on a stick—left by Jack as an offering to the Beast. The head, buzzing with flies, "speaks" to Simon, confirming that the true Beast is not a physical monster, but the evil living inside the boys themselves. Simon runs down the mountain to explain the truth but stumbles into the middle of a crazed, chaotic tribal dance. Overcome by mob mentality and fear, the boys mistake Simon for the Beast and murder him with their bare hands. Jack's tribe steals the glasses of Piggy (Ralph's intellectual, asthmatic advisor) to light their cooking fires. When Ralph and Piggy go to negotiate for the glasses, a sadistic boy named Roger rolls a massive boulder down a cliff. The rock crushes the conch shell and kills Piggy. Ralph is left completely alone and is hunted through the jungle by Jack’s tribe, who set the entire island on fire to smoke him out. Just as Ralph collapses on the beach, exhausted and facing certain death, he looks up to see a British naval officer. The officer, attracted by the massive smoke cloud, has arrived to rescue them. The novel ends with Ralph and the surviving boys weeping for the "end of innocence" and the "darkness of man's heart," while the officer stares awkwardly at his own warship.

To Zimbardo, William Golding's novel was not just a piece of fiction; it was a literary blueprint that perfectly matched his own psychological theories and past life experiences. Zimbardo’s obsession with how environments corrupt good people stemmed directly from his childhood. Born into a poor Sicilian immigrant family in the South Bronx, New York, he grew up surrounded by gang violence, crime, and poverty. Zimbardo watched many of his childhood friends—whom he knew to be fundamentally good, caring kids—gradually morph into violent criminals and gang members as they grew older. When he later read Lord of the Flies, he saw his childhood neighborhood reflected in Golding’s tropical island. The book gave him a clear academic framework to explain what he had already witnessed in real life: that a harsh, lawless environment can completely overpower a person's moral upbringing.

Zimbardo was not the only psychologist to grow up in the Bronx. Stanley Milgram was a classmate of Zimbardo’s at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, but their experiences of that time were quite different. Milgram was a Jew and as a child living in the Bronx during WWII, his experience was filtered through the news of the Holocaust. He saw the neighborhood as a place of refuge from a world gone mad with obedience exemplified by Hitler‘s influence over Nazi Germany. He viewed the Hitler Youth not as a collection of "bad kids," but as the ultimate example of how a system can capture and redirect the moral compass of an entire generation.

Milgram famously felt that his life was a matter of sheer luck. He often remarked that had he been born in Europe rather than the Bronx, he would have been a victim of the very systems he studied. This perspective made him see the Hitler Youth as a mirror image of himself—ordinary boys who were simply born into a different "barrel." Milgram’s fascination with the Hitler Youth focused on two specific "disturbing" elements:

The Erosion of Family Authority: He was struck by how the Nazi state successfully replaced the authority of the parent with the authority of the Führer. In his later experiments, he tested this by seeing if an experimenter could override a participant's personal conscience.
The Power of the Uniform: Much like Zimbardo, Milgram noticed that the Hitler Youth uniforms stripped away individuality. However, Milgram’s focus was on how the uniform signaled a rank in a hierarchy, making obedience feel like a duty rather than a choice. Zimbardo would later expand on Milgram’s work, arguing that conformity to toxic social roles and systemic pressures were the true drivers of cruelty.

Milgram was disturbed by how the Hitler Youth were taught that their actions—however cruel—were "noble" because they served a higher ideology. He wanted to prove that the "evil" of the Hitler Youth wasn't a German trait, but a human one that could be triggered anywhere if the authority figure provided a "worthy" enough excuse. In 1961 he performed his Obedience Studies at Yale University. In this experiment, participants (the "teachers") were ordered to administer increasingly severe, simulated electric shocks to a person in another room. The participants believed they were testing whether painful shocks would help the students learn more effectively. However, the actual goal of the study was to measure obedience to authority. The “learner” was an actor but the study participants did not know this. The participants genuinely believed they were causing agonising pain and potential death to their learners, so they experienced extreme, acute physical and psychological stress during the trials. As was later disclosed, the study reported that the participants began sweating profusely, trembling, stuttering, groaning, and digging their fingernails deep into their skin. Out of intense anxiety, 14 of the 40 participants in the initial study experienced uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter or smiling. Full-blown stress-induced seizures were recorded in three participants. Whenever anxious participants begged to stop, they were told "The experiment is for the advancement of science" and "You have no choice, you must go on" which intentionally stripped participants of their perceived freedom to quit

Discovering what they were capable of doing under pressure left permanent psychological scars on many volunteers. Participants had to leave the laboratory knowing they possessed the capacity to inflict potentially lethal, 450-volt shocks on an innocent person just because they were told to do so. Many experienced profound embarrassment, shame, and guilt over their compliance. Participants also felt deeply violated and manipulated by academic authorities. They reported a long-term inability to trust authority figures, institutions, or researchers again. The harm was worsened by how Milgram handled the aftermath of the experiment. Some left the Ivy League campus believing they had actually caused severe physical harm or a heart attack to the "learner". They were forced to carry that psychological burden for months until receiving a summary letter in the mail disclosing the deception

Whem Milgram shot to fame for this experiment, Zimbardo felt a profound professional drive to match or exceed his peer's legacy. While Milgram’s work suggested that human evil is driven by deference to authority (people doing bad things because they are told to). Zimbardo disagreed with this singular view. Zimbardo pointed to Lord of the Flies to argue a different point: that humans do not need an authority figure to command them to be cruel. In Golding's book, the boys become savages entirely on their own once societal structures disappear. Zimbardo became obsessed with designing experiments that would prove this exact mechanism—showing that anonymity and situational roles alone are enough to trigger cruelty.

So in time, Zimbardo borrowed Milgram’s exact operational paradigm—a fake "electric shock generator" to test participants willingness to deliver electric shocks to "learners" for incorrect answers. The emphasis Shifted from Obedience to Anonymity as Zimbardo wanted to see if masking participants' identities with hoods and oversized coats would cause them to deliver more electric shocks than identifiable participants. The results were that participants who wore Ku Klux Klan-style robes and hoods (making them anonymous and de-individuated) delivered shocks that were twice as long as those administered by participants wearing their own clothes and name tags.

In 1969, Zimbardo published his foundational academic paper on deindividuation, explicitly titled "The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos". The binary opposites in this title perfectly mirror the core structural conflict of Lord of the Flies:

Individuation/Reason/Order is the world of Ralph, Piggy, and the conch shell.
Deindividuation/Impulse/Chaos is the world of Jack, the painted faces, and the hunting tribe.

Zimbardo was hooked on this story because it beautifully illustrated his grand psychological hypothesis: civilization is merely a fragile mask. He firmly believed that beneath this mask lies a primal impulse toward chaos that can be easily unleashed by the right situational triggers.

At the end of the trials in 1968, Philip Zimbardo was offered a prestigious, tenured position as a full professor of psychology at Stanford University. Stanford sought Zimbardo to help pioneer its experimental social psychology program. He in turn was keen to pursue a more immersive, continuous environment to study how characters transform over days, not just hours. Stanford offered the physical facilities and academic freedom to construct a larger, long-term simulated environment. He got funding from the Office of Naval Research and used the money to transform the basement of Stanford's Jordan Hall into a highly detailed mock prison.

When Zimbardo originally created his Stanford Prison experiment there were a total of 24 college student participants selected. At any given time, the active simulation utilized 9 guards and 9 prisoners, with the remaining 6 participants kept on standby as alternates. The day before the study began, Zimbardo’s team held an orientation explicitly instructing the guards to be tough, strip the prisoners of their individuality, and instill a sense of fear and helplessness. The experiment happened at a time when youth culture was anti establishment and the young men who were playing the roles of the guards in the experiment thought they were helping prove that prisons were evil. They thought the experiment was about studying the prisoners and how negatively affected they would become from being confined, and mistreated. So many readily acted out the kinds of roles Zimbardo wanted. He emphasised to them they would have total control over the situation. On day two of the experiment the prisoners staged a rebellion and the guards devised a system of punishments, depriving the inmates of their clothing, denying them bathing privileges, forcing them to wear paper bags on their heads, and demanding them to do jumping jacks and push-ups. The prisoners became increasingly downtrodden. As a direct result of this Zimbardo got the outcome he wanted and shocking footage to stun the world.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) is now widely considered unscientific, methodologically deeply flawed, and closer to a theatrical simulation than a controlled experiment. Comprehensive archival investigations—notably by historian Thibault Le Texier—and direct testimonies from the original participants have thoroughly debunked the study's scientific merit.

When certain guards refused to act harshly, the research staff stepped in and explicitly told them to increase their aggression to ensure the success of the simulation. Participants knew exactly what a stereotypical "brutal guard" or "helpless prisoner" looked like from movies and media. One of the most aggressive guards ("John Wayne") admitted he deliberately adopted a fake, sadistic Southern accent and copied characters from the movie Cool Hand Luke to help the researchers get the dramatic results they wanted. The dramatic emotional collapses that Zimbardo used as proof of psychological trauma were, in some cases, entirely fabricated. Douglas Korpi, the prisoner whose screaming meltdown forced his early release on day two, later admitted he was completely faking his breakdown. He did not lose his mind; he was simply a college student who wanted to leave so he could go home and study for his exams, but Zimbardo initially refused to let him out. The study advertised for volunteers specifically for a "psychological study of prison life". Later replication attempts proved that ads explicitly mentioning "prison life" naturally attract individuals who score significantly higher in traits like aggression, authoritarianism, and narcissism, while scoring lower on empathy, which would have skewed the experiment’s final outcome.

The University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand is cited by Zimbardo as having replicated his experiment in 1973, just two years after the original Stanford Prison Experiment. While the original 1971 study is famous worldwide, the New Zealand version is much less documented. Zimbardo has frequently mentioned this replication in his lectures and books (such as The Lucifer Effect), claiming it yielded "similar results" to his own—specifically that the "guards" became aggressive and "prisoners" became submissive. Like the original, the New Zealand study has been criticised by modern psychologists. Skeptics argue that because Zimbardo's results were already published and famous, the New Zealand participants may have simply been acting out the roles they expected the researchers wanted to see (a phenomenon called "demand characteristics"). Soon after this period, ethics committees (IRBs) became much stricter. Replications of this nature became almost impossible to get approved in New Zealand or elsewhere.

Much later on in 2002, a British Prison Study attempted to replicate Zimbardo’s experiment under ethical controls and found completely opposite results.

There are several reasons why Zimbardo’s version remains so popular even today. This includes the dominating presence of his work in textbooks. For more than 50 years, the Stanford Prison Experiment served as a cornerstone of introductory psychology education worldwide. Analysis of major introductory textbooks shows that the overwhelming majority of authors have traditionally presented Zimbardo's conclusions as factual, while entirely omitting or downplaying critical counter-evidence. His experiment features iconic, highly dramatic imagery—such as guards wearing reflective aviator shades wielding nightsticks over cowering, numbered prisoners. This Hollywood-ready aesthetic has been reinforced by multiple feature films, television shows, and pop-culture references that treat the event as a dark truth about human nature. The "situationist" conclusion—that healthy, good people will naturally transform into monsters when given power—is a comforting, deeply compelling narrative. It provides a simple, direct framework that people routinely use to rationalize real-world atrocities, from corporate corruption to military torture.

Zimbardo fiercely defended his study's credibility until his death in 2024, despite the mounting evidence against it. As critics increasingly accused him of actively engineering the cruelty in the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo leaned heavily on the Lord of the Flies archetype to protect his reputation. By framing his experiment as a real-life version of Golding's island, he could argue that the guards' cruelty was an inevitable, natural law of human nature rather than the result of his own flawed methodology and active coaching.

Dave Eshelman, known as "John Wayne"—faced significant public backlash, threats, and verbal attacks once the study became famous. The public reaction to the experiment was intense, especially after footage of the guards' cruelty was released. As the most aggressive guard, he became the "face" of the experiment's cruelty. He reported being accosted in public and receiving hostile letters. People often struggled to separate his "character" from his actual personality. For years, these men were viewed by the public as potential sociopaths or "closet sadists.” Some participants expressed fear that future employers would see the footage and view them as unstable or violent.

In recent years, the public's anger has shifted from the guards to Philip Zimbardo himself.

The public shock over his methods directly forced global academic institutions to establish modern Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and rewrite human subject protection guidelines. While basic ethical committees had existed in loose, localized forms since the 1950s, the standardized, federally mandated, and rigorous IRB system used today was legally codified across the United States in July 1974.

The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), alongside Stanley Milgram's obedience studies (1961), served as the primary behavioral case studies that pushed Congress to act. Zimbardo's study directly shaped the strict ethical parameters that modern IRBs enforce:

An Absolute Right to Withdraw: Zimbardo explicitly blocked a prisoner from leaving the basement when the student requested to exit. Modern IRBs mandate that all consent forms explicitly state a participant can leave an experiment at any split second without explanation or penalty.
Objective Monitoring: Zimbardo compromised his objectivity by acting as the prison "Superintendent." Modern IRBs require that researchers maintain strict detachment and that independent safety monitors step in if a study becomes dangerous.
Elimination of "More Than Minimal Risk": Zimbardo’s study proved that psychological trauma could manifest just as dangerously as physical harm. IRBs are now specifically designed to weigh the risk-to-benefit ratio of behavioral tests, effectively banning highly immersive, open-ended trauma simulations.

More recently the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, caused a resurgence of interest in the Standard Prison experiment, and Philip Zimbardo served directly as an expert witness for the defense during the 2004 court-martial of Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, the highest-ranking military police officer charged in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Zimbardo used his role to argue that the abuses were the result of a toxic environment rather than inherently malicious individuals. His argument for the defence suggested;

"Bad Barrels," Not "Bad Apples": The U.S. military and the Bush administration publicly blamed the torture on a few rogue, sadistic individuals—a dispositional narrative Zimbardo fiercely contested. He argued that the fault lay within a "bad barrel" (the systemic situation created by the military) rather than the "bad apples" (the individual soldiers).
Mitigating Situational Factors: Zimbardo testified that Frederick—whom he described as a previously normal, patriotic, and highly rated American soldier—had his morality entirely eroded by extreme situational pressures. He cited severe sleep deprivation, a lack of proper training, zero oversight from commanding officers, and an institutional expectation to "break down" prisoners for interrogation as factors that forced conformity to an abusive role.
The Stanford Parallel: Zimbardo explicitly used the findings of his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment to demonstrate how quickly healthy, ordinary individuals will cross ethical lines and become cruel when placed in an unmonitored, dehumanizing prison environment.

Ultimately, the military judge disregarded Zimbardo's psychological defense. The court ruled that Frederick was fully responsible for his choices and should have known to resist the environment. In 2004, Frederick pleaded guilty to five counts of abuse and was sentenced to eight years in prison, given a dishonorable discharge, and stripped of his rank.

I hope we can all learn from this and focus on being the best versions of ourselves and not the worst.

See you in the next post!