In August nineteen seventy-one, twenty-four ordinary college students were randomly assigned as guards or prisoners in a basement at Stanford University. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks. It was stopped after six days because the guards had become sadistic, the prisoners were breaking down, and the researcher running it had lost his own grip on what he was supposed to be doing. One woman visited on the fifth day, looked at what was happening, and was the only person out of fifty observers who said it needed to stop.

In this episode of 5 Minute Strange, we cover the full six days of the Stanford Prison Experiment — the escalating abuse, the psychological breakdowns, the graduate student who ended it, and the recordings uncovered in two thousand and nineteen that showed the lead researcher coaching the guards to be more aggressive. The experiment spent fifty years as a cornerstone of psychology teaching. The truth turned out to be more complicated than anyone admitted.

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