Attention, Netflix: The Stanford Prison Experiment was a Sham

On Tuesday, September 15^th, 2026, Variety made the disturbing announcement that Netflix is commissioning a new reality show with a premise identical to the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment:

The series, titled ‘The New Stanford Prison Experiment,’ will debut on Oct. 21. The first season will consist of six 45-minute episodes.

Why would they move ahead with such a self-evidently dishonorable premise for a show? I’ll let producer Jane Lipsitz explain, from the same Variety article:

The Stanford Prison Experiment has always fascinated me. Despite its serious ethical flaws, it asked a fundamental question that feels even more relevant today: how does power affect ethical choices? Getting the opportunity to reimagine this social experiment was one of the most intense, exhilarating — and definitely nail-biting — experiences we’ve ever had. Netflix has always been an incredible supporter of ambitious projects that take risks, push boundaries and tell challenging stories, so we were incredibly grateful to have them as our partners on this one.

I’m gonna let you in on a little insight, Jane: describing The Stanford Prison Experiment as having “serious ethical flaws” is putting it mildly, but not for the reasons you imagined when you greenlit this reprehensible project. This “study” was a fraud; a completely discredited PR stunt that should never have even risen to the level of a widely-shared anecdote, let alone one of the most recognized sociological studies ever conducted. If we should take anything away from the “experiment,” it’s that poor planning and lack of proper ethical oversight can ruin even the most well-intentioned scientific inquiries. Because Philip Zimbardo was nothing if not a man with good intentions. At first. At least for his time. He was a vocal advocate for prison reform. He conceived of this whole endeavor during a time when prison conditions were very much at the forefront of political discourse. Actually, that is not quite true; Zimbardo lifted the idea from one of his students. This was discovered by a French research fellow named Thibault Le Texier, a man who deserves the lion’s share of the credit for exposing and debunking this study. Most of what I am about to reveal in this article is thanks to his diligent investigative work. Thank you, Monsieur Le Texier, truly, for getting to the bottom of this.

Anyway, on top of the controversies surrounding inmate abuse in the 1960s and the struggle for psychologists and sociologists to adequately explain still-fairly-recent historical atrocities like The Holocaust, the Stanley Milgram experiment was only about a decade old at this time. That was the study that solidified the notion that people will do horrible things against their better judgment if an authority figure tells them to do it. Zimbardo openly stated his desire to prove something even more unsettling: that people, without being directed to do so (put a pin in that), will act monstrous to other people if they are simply placed in positions of power over them, and this inherent corrupting influence of the trappings of power was what explained things like the Tucker State Prison Farm abuses. Zimbardo put out a literal press release on the second day of the experiment that stated, and I quote:

The study should make us aware that prison reform is psychologically necessary so that the men who commit crimes are not transformed into objects dehumanized by their prison experience.

Hey, that seems a bit… problematic, right? To publicly state the political intentions of a study as it is being conducted? If Zimbardo was so hopeful that the results could be a useful tool of advocacy for improving the conditions of our correctional institutions, wouldn’t that motivate him to ensure his study produced the most lurid, shocking, horrible outcomes to grease the gears for that political change? Surprise, surprise — that is exactly what Zimbardo did! He organized the assigned “guards” into an orientation period where his research assistants overtly pressured them to be aggressive and exert their dominance over the prisoners! Zimbardo later admitted, on cross-examination during the Abu Ghraib trial (he was brought on as, I kid you not, an expert witness), that he instructed the guards to place bags over the heads of prisoners while transporting them from one part of the prison to another! Remember, the whole premise of this experiment was to see if people autonomously abuse their positions of authority with no outside influences on their behavior!

This brazen manipulation was not limited to just the subjects playing the guards. In the consent form that participants signed, the last part states that they understand they “will only be released from participation for reasons of health deemed adequate by the medical advisers to the research project or for other reasons deemed appropriate by Dr. Philip Zimbardo.” And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Institutional Review Boards are so important to the scientific process. Seriously, what is the difference between tricking college students into believing they are being imprisoned against their will and convicts being imprisoned against their will? And this isn’t even getting into the insanely flawed selection criteria that practically sought out people who would behave in the way Zimbardo wanted.

And even then, despite the selection process and the researchers doing everything they could to strong-arm the guards into being outright sadists, most of the guards were… not. Only about a third of them behaved with any brutality or aggressiveness. Two-thirds committed no acts of cruelty during the six days they were in their roles. And, far from the willing submissives Zimbardo insisted on in his myriad press appearances since, the prisoners banded together, rebelled, and demanded better conditions very early on in their incarceration. The only people who uniformly committed sadistic acts while disingenuously acting helplessly deferential to forces beyond their control were Zimbardo and his research assistants.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has never been successfully replicated. Survivors of abusive prisons in the real world emerged as some of the study’s harshest critics, and for good reason. It did nothing to advance our understanding of incarceration, human psychology, or the nature of evil. But that didn’t matter. This study remains a staple of pop science solely because it flattered our cynical view of other people, absolving us of any feelings of responsibility to foster fairer or kinder societies.

And I have no doubt that Netflix will do everything they can to try to engineer the same cruelty for the sadistic enjoyment of their audience. Much like how Mr. Beast will often set up game show scenarios designed to expose how selfish and destructive people are, only to be stymied by contestants more often working together as a team, instead, this show will either be criminally unethical in its attempts to force the outcome people still mistakenly believe Zimbardo’s study organically came to, or they will produce an extremely boring reality show observing participants behaving contrary to how dopes like Lipsitz assume they always will in prison settings.

The producers of this project, along with the executives at Netflix who gave them the green light, should be ashamed of themselves either way.