The 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment,
is not a documentary of the experiment on power aggrandizement that took place
in 1971; actors play the supervising professor s well as the 24 students who were
the subjects—12 randomly being assigned as guards and the other 12 as prisoners.
The film can be characterized as a psychological drama on human nature, given
the salience therein of the will to power. Had Nietzsche been alive to watch
the film, he would have been engrossed, finding much to confirm his theory that
not only the will to power is the basic human motive, but also the weak too
easily resort to cruelty (and pettiness) to feel any pleasure they can out of the
exercise of whatever power they can muster, given their innate weakness.
In the film, professor Philip
Zimbardo, who lets the experiment run on too long, given the violence being
committed by the students who are playing prison guards, initially tells all of
the students that touching (let alone hitting others) is against the rules of
the experiment. Be that as it may, it isn’t long before one guard, and then
another, presumptuously break that rule, and the guards’ violence only gets
worse. To be sure, Zimbardo does not intervene to give a disincentive to the
guards who have violated the rule because the professor wants to see how the psychological
dynamic of power naturally unfolds. That the subjects are actually students who
know that the “prison” space is actually on campus, and thus is not a real
prison and they are not really guards and prisoners renders the natural dynamic
of increasing power aggrandizement by the guards on the prisoners and the resistance
of some of the latter out of their own innate will to power all the more amazing.
In other words, the liberties (of others) that human beings naturally take in dominating
and enforcing the domination is clear from the experiment, and the film
faithful depicts this vital finding.
The implications are huge, especially
in terms of the value in having formidable institutional checks on prison
guards and municipal (and university) police employees. Their tendency to “take
liberties” even in easily turning to unjustified violence to impose whatever
power they presume is justified psychologically can be assumed, rather than
merely hypothesized, by government officials and city (or university)
residents. The case of university police in the United States, whose federal
constitution reserves the police power to the state and federal governments, is
especially dangerous, given the tenuous link of accountability from the
standpoint of representative democracy. In fact, university police managers are
subject institutionally to a conflict of interest in that their bosses in
university administration may be one party to a dispute, such as in the case of
student protests. At Yale, for example, during Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the
university’s police arrested 46 students—the remaining protesters went
immediately to sit in a street intersection so they would be under the
jurisdiction of the municipal police department, which in turn is
accountable to a local government rather than a private, non-profit
corporation.
As the case of Israel in Gaza
dramatically shows, even a democratically elected government can perpetuate
crimes against humanity, so it is incorrect to claim that such crimes are
committed only by dictators. In the case of the Putin administration in Russia
and its multi-year invasion of Ukraine, the Stanford prison experiment is very
relevant in explaining the “widespread, systematic torture and ill-treatment of
both Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war, including cases of sexual
violence,” according to Claudia Julio, the UN Assistant Secretary-General for
Human Rights, who spoke at an informal session of the UN’s Security Council on
August 11, 2026.[1] “More
than 95% of the Ukrainian prisoners of war and 85% of the civilian detainees
reported being tortured or ill-treated, often repeatedly. They also reported
being subjected to sexual abuse and food deprivation while being held in
inhumane conditions and not being provided adequate medical services.”[2]
After watching The Stanford Prison Experiment, anyone could readily
grasp how such horrendous treatment can come about in conditions in which such
a stark power-differential exists. Even just the natural human reaction to
being unjustly subject to abuses of power can be expected to result in more
violence as if to retaliate in enforcing the presumed entitlement to the unjustified
power. Rules or laws against such violence are easily obviated mentally, and
even more violence is inflicted as if to say, how dare you resist my
over-reaching! You will pay dearly! Countering externally the sheer
presumption to exercise such power is two degrees of separation from the squalid
mentality. In the film, were the professor to directly confront the guards in
real time for having unilaterally violated the rule against even touching the prisoners,
let alone hitting him merely for resisting the unjustified violence, the guards
would have been shocked in realizing just how out of line they allowed
themselves to go. The human mind can go on and on in taking liberties without
checking itself by thinking, Have I gone too far? In other words, the human
brain short-circuits itself in terms of is presumption to power-aggrandizement.
This is the idea from the film that has been so overlooked.
Whether examining the conduct
of the Russian prison-guards or the Israelis soldiers in Gaza with regard to
people they view as sub-human, a sordid perspective that also can be gleamed
from the sheer violent presumptuousness of the student-guards in the film, the
conduct and its psychological underpinnings are no accident. The innate
tendency to go too far in terms of power is not limited to cases of mental
illness, but is in human nature itself, so rather than treat violent
over-reaches even in violation of law as aberrations, they should be expected
and thus fortified against, institutionally.
In terms of local and private
police departments, an implication is that those departments’ internal affairs offices
should not be relied upon as sufficient to ensure accountability on abuse
police employees. In terms of governments committing crimes against humanity
and war crimes, an implication is that a global order treats national
sovereignty as absolute is insufficient; international adjudication and
enforcement of international law is necessary. Treating abuses of power,
whether by prison guards or police employees, or by government officials, as
exceptions to human nature rather than as very likely ignores the vital lesson that
the film can provide to humanity. In other words, human nature is very susceptible
to getting carried away with power even to the extent of unilaterally resorting
to violence to enforce on other people the power that one presumes the right to
inflict on others. The sheer presumption of power that is dubious and the use
of vocal and even physical violence to enforce the presumption reveal just how pathetic
human nature is with respect to wielding power over other people. Were more
people to take the real message of the film seriously—and it is astonishing that
the film has not had more impact—much more would presumably be done legislatively
to hold police and even governments accountable. The assumption would change
from treating abuses of power as exceptions to being the rule, and thus as being
in more need of being checked institutionally and legislatively. Even taking
national sovereignty as absolute could be subject to amendment so as to allow
for the enforcement of international law.
2. Ibid.
