Television has rerun the Stanford prison experiment before, most notably in 2002 when the BBC aired The Experiment, which advertised itself as a more rigorous version of the stunt where volunteers role-play as prison guards and prisoners. The creator of the original 1971 experiment, Philip Zimbardo, would probably have criticised the new versions to preserve his own status, but the main point he made was valid. These people all know they’re on TV, he said. They’re playing to the cameras.
Whether the participants in a behavioural study forget they’re part of a study is an eternal debate point. One of the strengths of the other notorious American people-are-awful research project, the Milgram experiment, was that it made the artifice part of the process, telling the volunteers that they’d spoil the science if they didn’t keep giving strangers electric shocks: “The experiment requires that you continue.” Without that, the stooges may never act naturally; if they know the experiment is also a TV show, they definitely won’t.
