How has Zimbardo responded to our work?
Philip Zimbardo has been very critical of the BBC Study. In his reply to our key article in the British Journal of Social Psychology, he makes a range of criticisms: • (a) that our study had no psychological reality for the participants; • (b) that it was fundamentally flawed because participants knew they were taking part in an experiment and that this would be shown on television; • (c) that (despite our claims) the division of participants into Prisoners and Guards was not random but rather we purposefully made the “big tough rough guys” into Prisoners and the “more effete guys” into Guards; • (d) that our description of our various interventions as theoretically informed is just fancy rhetoric designed to cover up our bias and meddling; and • (e) that in reality, what we were doing was not science at all, but a pretence at science for the purposes of creating entertaining television. Many of these ideas are summarized in his belief • (f) that it is ludicrous to imagine a prison in
