If you are reading this in the UK, you may already have heard the BBC's publicity drums, alerting you to the imminent screening of the thinking person's answer to Big Brother. The BBC insists that The Experiment, which begins on Tuesday, is serious social science, examining what happens when you build a prison and populate it with ordinary people, some dressed as prisoners and some as guards.
If this sounds familiar, it is because the BBC's series imitates one of the world's best-known social simulations, the Stanford prison experiment, which took place in 1971. Then, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychologist, built a prison in a university basement and arranged for the Palo Alto police to "arrest" nine student volunteers. They were stripped, searched, deloused and locked up in the newly built cells, where they were guarded by nine fellow students.
Six days into the two-week experiment, Prof Zimbardo had to call it off. After brutally putting down a revolt, the guards were forcing prisoners to clean toilet bowls with their bare hands. Some prisoners were so distressed that their parents asked lawyers to help free them. Prof Zimbardo himself lost his moral bearings, at one point asking the police if he could transfer the prisoners to real cells to foil a rumoured escape.
Prof Zimbardo said afterwards that the exercise should never be repeated. The lessons he drew from his experiment have remained unchallenged: "Any deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us to do."*
Steve Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Alex Haslam of Exeter University, the psychologists behind the BBC's series, argue they had every right to repeat the experiment because they took care to avoid Prof Zimbardo's pitfalls. They did not participate in the exercise the way Prof Zimbardo did. They remained detached. A panel of clinical psychologists, who had the right to stop the experiment at any time, observed closely.
Above all, they say, the BBC experiment is justified by its conclusions. Dressing people in uniforms does not necessarily turn them into monsters. "Zimbardo's analysis is not only intellectually wrong but also morally suspect," Mr Reicher says. "It excuses people. It says they have no choice."
So what happened in the BBC's series? The prisoners behaved in a similar way to those in the Stanford experiment. They resisted, they revolted, they plotted escape. What was different in the BBC series was the reaction of the guards. They did not turn into brutes. They failed to exercise any authority at all.
The prisoners took over the prison and turned it into a commune. That did not work either. No one could stand the absence of rules. Some of the prisoners plotted to impose a tyrannical regime, at which point the two psychologists ended the experiment, one day short of the 10 days they had scheduled.
Why did the BBC guards not turn into tyrants? Were the British volunteers less authoritarian by inclination than the Americans? that is unlikely. The Stanford students were firmly anti-authority. The early 1970s were a time of student revolt in the US. Before assigning them their roles, Prof Zimbardo asked the volunteers whether they wanted to be guards or prisoners. They all wanted to be prisoners.
The real difference is that the UK psychologists conducted a different experiment. In Prof Zimbardo's exercise, the prisoners were bullied from the moment they arrived. They were forced to wear smocks with no underwear, had chains locked to their legs and were denied contact with the outside world, apart from short "prison visits" from their families.
The British participants, on the other hand, never forget that they are on television. For all of their engagement with this game, they know it is not for real. The preview tape of the first episode shows them referring several times to itbeing an experiment. And, in spite of the BBC's insistence that this series is quite different from reality television, The Experiment's participants unburden themselves to the camera in a video booth straight out of Big Brother.
Mr Reicher insists this does not matter. The Experiment is not really about prison, he says. So what is it about? "It's the story of every organisation you will ever work for," he says. The confused guards in the BBC series are like many in authority today. Managers, for example, want to be close to their staff. "They confuse being friendly with being friends," he says.
Perhaps they do - but then why set this exercise in a prison? Why not set it in a company? There are many interesting debates to be had about the nature of authority in the modern workplace. But, in democratic societies at least, we can walk out of companies we dislike.
Prisons, on the other hand, are filled with people who cannot leave. That is their point - and that was Prof Zimbardo's point. In closed societies, where brutality is the norm, ordinary people are capable of dreadful deeds. We have a blood-soaked century's proof of that.
* Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
www.prisonexp.org/pdf/blass.pdf