Le Texier is the historian who went through Philip Zimbardo's archives. The hosts had just laid out that the Stanford Prison Experiment's rules were written three months earlier by David Jaffe for a student prison study of his own, and that Jaffe then served as Zimbardo's warden. In the textbook version, the guards invent their cruelty on the spot.
could see that he could get striking results. So he set up a similar environment and he thought, okay, we're just going to make it longer because two days is too short. But I want to replicate this experiment. I want to find the same results. I don't have any potassis. I know the results I want to get. So I will design the experiment to get the results I have in mind. So he had written the conclusions before even starting the experiment.
And here's the piece that really reframes the whole thing: the guards weren't left alone to become anything. They were actively coached on how to behave by the warden. And the warden was, guess who? David Jaffe, the author of that original experiment.
And this warden was giving explicit orders to the guards. The guards who were a bit too lenient, who are not very involved in the experiment, he would take them apart and tell them, you know, you have to get into the action. You have to be a mean guard because if you're too nice, then the experiment will fail. And so we won't be able to go to the press and say that we have to reform prisons, that prisons are bad. So even if you don't like what you're doing, you have to be a mean guard to make the experiment a success.
Latexier calls it a triple pressure. The first was that you're a paid employee as a participant. The second was that you were working under a famous professor. And the third was that you were told this is for a good cause, prison reform. Any direction coming from the boss in this scenario is going to be followed. It simply wasn't a situation where the students would naturally reveal their true nature, not when there was a manager giving you a performance review, so to speak.
And there's the selection bias piece, too. In 2007, in a 2007 replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment by Carnahan and McFarland, they ran Zimbardo's original recruitment ad word for word in their local press. Now, what they found was that the people who responded were not exactly the normal folks that Zimbardo claims they found.
Looking for volunteers for psychological study of prison life that may last two weeks, you will have a certain type of people responding to the ad, people attracted to violence or extreme experiences or and people who would be willing to live in an intense situation.