Psychoanalysis and Politics: The Stanford Prison Experiment

Jan Haaken and Tod Sloan discuss Phillip Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which participants played the roles of guards and prisoners. The inspiration for several films, the study is usually remembered as showing that normal people can quickly become sadistic in contexts that invite such behavior. But Jan and Tod point out that this downplays evidence of prisoner resistance and ignores several features of the context of the study itself. images from imdb.com & memecollection.net