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The Lucifer Effect
turning point in their perception of the prisoners, who suddenly appeared to
them as "dangerous" and needing to be suppressed. They also resented the nega-
tive personal references and cursing that some prisoners made to them during the
rebellion, which they considered demeaning and which elicited their retaliation
in kind.
A difficult element of the debriefing was allowing the guards to explain why
they had done what they did, without sanctioning their justifications, for those
were simply excuses for abusive, hostile, and even sadistic behavior. The end of the
experiment also meant the end of enjoying having all that newfound guard
power at their command. As Guard Burdan noted in his diary, "When Phil con-
fides in me that the experiment was going to be over, I feel elated, but shocked to
find some other guards disappointed somewhat because of the loss of money, but
somewhat because they were enjoying themselves."
8
A Final Mixing of the Categories
In the third hour of debriefing a lot of nervous laughter filled the laboratory room
when we brought in the former prisoners to meet their captors, indistinguishable
in their civilian clothes. Without their uniforms, numbers, and distinctive acces-
sories, they were interchangeable, hard even for me to identify, having gotten so
used to seeing them in their prison garb. (Remember, in 1971 there was hair
everywhere, shoulder-length hair and long sideburns on most of the students in
both categories, some of whom had full mustaches as well.)
The joint session was, in the words of one former prisoner, "stiffly polite,"
compared to the more relaxed and friendly prisoners' session. As each was scop-
ing out the others, one prisoner asked whether some recruits had been selected to
be guards because they were taller. Jerry-5486 said, "I had the feeling somewhere
along the study that the guards were bigger than the prisoners, and I wonder if
the average height of the guards is higher than the average height of the prison-
ers. I don't know if that's true or not or if that was my perception because of the
uniforms." Before I answered "No," I asked all the students to line up in order of
their height, from tallest to shortest. There was an almost perfect height match
between the guards on one side and the prisoners on the other. What became evi-
dent is that the prisoners had come to perceive the guards as taller than they ac-
tually were, as though their guard power provided them with a two-inch shoe lift.
There were not any direct confrontations between abused prisoners and
abusing guards, as I had anticipated there might be. In part, this was because
such personal challenges would have been awkward in a group of more than
twenty people. It is likely, however, that what remained of the strong emotions felt
by some of the former prisoners had to be consciously suppressed now that the
power grid had been deactivated. It also helped that a few of the guards openly
apologized for submerging themselves too deeply into their role and taking it too
seriously. Their apologies eased the tension and stood as proxy for the tougher
guards who did not apologize openly, like Hellmann.
Friday's Fade to Black 185
At this debriefing session, former Tough Guard Arnett, our sociology gradu-
ate student, recounted two events that had impressed him:
One was Zimbardo's observation of "prisoners' " immersion in their in-
mate roles . . . expressed by people staying inmates even when they said
they'd give up their payment if they could be released [paroled]. The other
impression is the seeming inability of former "prisoners" at the meeting to
believe that "John Wayne" and I, and perhaps other guards (I felt that we
were the two most disliked guards) had been completely acting in our
roles. Some or many "prisoners" seemed to feel that we were actually
sadistic or extremely authoritarian people and that our professions of act-
ing were cover-ups, to hide the real nature of our behavior from them, or
ourselves, or both. I am absolutely sure that for myself at least, this was not
the case.
9
One psychological observation that I offered was about the lack of humor in
our prison and the failure to use humor to defuse tension or even to bring some
reality to an unreal situation. For example, guards who were not pleased with the
extreme behavior of their shift mates could have made a joke at their expense in
guard quarters, saying that they should be getting double pay for overacting their
role. Or the prisoners might have used humor to pull themselves out of the unreal
basement jail by asking the guards what this place had been used for before it be-
came a jail: a pigsty? Or a frat house, maybe? Humor breaks through the preten-
sions of person and place. However, in the past week there had been none to be
found in this sad place.
Before we adjourned, I asked them all to be sure they had completed their
final evaluations of the experience they had undergone and to complete some
other forms that Curt Banks had available. I also invited them to write a short ret-
rospective diary of the events that stood out in their memory during the following
month. They would get a fee for doing so. Finally, they would all be invited back in
a few weeks for a "Class of 1971" reunion to review some of the data we had
gathered. A slide show and video clips would be available.
It should be added that I maintained contact with many of the participants
over a number of years, all of them through correspondence whenever there was
a publication or media show of the study. In addition, some of them participated
in various television programs that featured our study for decades after this expe-
rience, a few even to this day. We will discuss the aftereffects of this experience on
them later on.
What Does It Mean to Be a Prisoner or a Guard?
Before we turn in the next chapter to examining some of the objective data we col-
lected over the six days of study and to reflect on the serious ethical issues raised
by the experiment, I think it would be useful to review some of the insights we
gathered from a selection of our participants.
186 The Lucifer Effect
On Being in the Role of Prisoner
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