How Ordinary Students Became Evil | Stanford Prison Experiment

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]August 1971, >> [music] >> Stanford University. A psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo had one disturbing question. What if evil isn't born inside us? What if the environment creates it? To find out, he recruited 24 completely normal college students, healthy, intelligent, [music] ordinary.

[00:00:18]Then he randomly divided them into two groups, prisoners and guards. A fake prison [music] was built inside the basement of Stanford University. The experiment was supposed to last two full weeks. It barely survived six days.

[00:00:30][music] By day two, the guards had already started abusing their power. They screamed [music] at prisoners, forced them to do endless push-ups, humiliated them in front of everyone, and woke them up in the middle of the night for no [music] reason. No one told them to do it, but they kept escalating. Then came day three. One prisoner completely broke down mentally. He started screaming [music] uncontrollably, crying, panicking, losing touch with reality.

[00:00:55]Researchers were forced to remove him from the experiment, >> [music] >> but things only got worse. By day five, the guards were inventing psychological [music] torture tactics on their own.

[00:01:04]Not physical violence, something more disturbing.

[00:01:08]>> [music] >> Mind games, isolation, fear, power. One guard, who had been a perfectly normal student just days earlier, [music] later admitted something terrifying. He said he became genuinely sadistic >> [music] >> and even started looking forward to the night shifts because that's when he could fully control the prisoners. And the scariest part? Philip Zimbardo himself became so deeply [music] absorbed in the role of prison superintendent that he stopped seeing the students as human beings until someone [music] finally snapped him back to reality. His girlfriend visited the prison on day six. She watched what was happening for less than 10 minutes and immediately [music] told him, "You have to shut this down." So he did. The Stanford Prison [music] Experiment revealed something terrifying about human nature. Under the right conditions, ordinary people can become monsters. This is Untold America.