Are people inherently evil? Is society just a barrier between us and our worst impulses, preventing us from exacting violence on one another, albeit through laws enforced with the thinly veiled threat of comparable violence? Must absolute power always corrupt absolutely? If left to our own devices, without checks to our authority, would we abuse it? The Stanford Prison Experiment, director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s chilling dramatization of the infamous Philip Zimbardo study, posits a painfully pessimistic response to those questions. Not only would abuses of power occur without safeguards in place – they would occur almost immediately.
In the 1971 study at the center of this relentlessly grim thriller, volunteers (college guys, earning $15 a day) are separated by a coin flip into “prisoners” and “guards.” In the basement of a campus building, the guards are given free reign to watch over the prisoners and assert their authority in whatever manner seems most appropriate to them.
In the 1971 study at the center of this relentlessly grim thriller, volunteers (college guys, earning $15 a day) are separated by a coin flip into “prisoners” and “guards.” In the basement of a campus building, the guards are given free reign to watch over the prisoners and assert their authority in whatever manner seems most appropriate to them.
- 7/23/2015
- by Isaac Feldberg
- We Got This Covered
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