efore we explore a range of examples of how far the SPE has traveled in the social science and general public realms, I need to present briefly a criticism of our study from one of my early idols, Erich Fromm. As a student, my thinking was influenced by his penetrating analysis in Escape From Freedom, showing how the rise of authoritarian dictators is possible when people surrender their freedom to seek the illusion of security. However, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm challenges the assertion that our psychological tests enabled us to pre select student volunteers who were "normal" without any evidence of pathology. From his psychoanalytic perspective such objective assessments do not get at the deeper aspect of human nature. He believes that the guards must have had sadistic tendencies and the prisoners masochistic ones--to begin with, rather than situational forces creating such behaviors.

He writes: ... "the tests showed no sadistic or masochistic character traits. As far as psychologists are concerned, to whom manifest behavior is the main dictum, this conclusion might be quite correct. However, on the basis of psychoanalytic experience it is not very convincing. Character traits are often entirely unconscious and, furthermore, cannot be discovered by conventional psychological tests; as far as projective tests are concerned, such as the T.A.T. [Thematic Apperception Test] of the Rorschach, only investigators with considerable experience in the study of unconscious processes will discover much unconscious material." (Pp. 81-82) That may be true in cases of some experts being able to detect latent pathologies in some research participants, but the reliability of projective tests has been shown to be too low to have any value in assessments of larger groups of people, nor is their any solid evidence of their predictive utility.

The Mock Psychiatric Ward Experience

For three days, twenty-nine staff members at Elgin State Hospital in Illinois were confined to a ward of their own, a mental ward in which they performed the role of "patient." Twenty-two regular staff played their usual roles while trained observers and video cameras recorded what transpired. "It was really fantastic the things that happened in there," reported Norma Jean Orlando (1973), director of the research. In a short time the mock patients began act in ways that were indistinguishable from those of real patients: Six tried to escape, two withdrew into themselves, two wept uncontrollably, one came close to having a nervous breakdown. Most experienced a general increase in tension, anxiety, frustration, and despair. The vast majority of staff-patients (over 75 percent) reported feeling each of the following: "incarcerated," without an identity, as if my feelings were not important, nobody listening to me, not treated as a person, nobody cared about me, forgetting it was an experiment, and really feeling like a patient. One staff-member-turned patient who suffered during his weekend ordeal gained enough insight to declare: "I used to look at the patients as if they were a bunch of animals; I never knew what they were going through before."

The positive outcome of this study was the formation of an organization of staff members who worked cooperatively with current and former patients. They have become dedicated to raising the consciousness of the rest of the hospital personnel about the way patients were being mistreated, as well as working at personally improving their own relationship to patients, and of patients’ relationship with staff. They came to realize the power of their "total situation" to transform the behavior of patients and staff in unwelcome ways.

A Prison Experiment Replication in Another Culture

A team of researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia extended the SPE by having one condition similar to ours and several other variants to explore how social organizations influence the relationship between prisoners and guards (Lovibond, Mithiran, & Adams, 1979). Their "Standard Custodial" regime was modeled on medium security prisons in Australia and was closest in its procedure to the SPE. The "Individualized Custodial" regime added guard training that encouraged prisoner self-respect while maintaining security. The "Participatory" regime went beyond custodial care to train guards to encourage constructive and responsible behavior among the prisoners. Six prisoners and four guards were randomly assigned to these three treatments for a four-day period. An equal number of participants were included in a replication of these three regimes. (There was a high degree of replicability of the results of all three simulations, one of the most compelling features of the experiment for the investigators.)

A constant undercurrent of hostility between prisoners and guards characterized the Standard Custodial regime. This role-playing simulation mimicked what was experienced in the SPE: hostile exchanges, arbitrary control, and harassment, frustrations, and insubordination. However, there was not the same sense among the prisoners of not being able to terminate their participation at will as happened in our study. The authors conclude, "It is clear that our Standard Custodial regime induced ordinary people with little knowledge and no experience of prisons, to behave in much the same way as prisoners and officers in real prisons. On the other hand, changes in the experimental prison regime produced dramatic changes in the relations between officer and prisoner subjects." (p. 283)

The Individualized Custodial regime developed a paternalistic atmosphere, with flat affect, and little hostility. Most benign was the Participatory regime, which created a general atmosphere of tolerance and cooperation: no hostility, and conflicts readily resolved within groups.

The researchers go on to summarize the central conclusion of their rigorous experimental protocol by noting, "Our results thus support the major conclusion of Zimbardo et al that hostile, confrontive relations in prisons result primarily from the nature of the prison regime, rather than the personal characteristics of inmates and officers." (Pp. 283, 285) These results, within this research design, also help offset skepticism about the validity of such simulation experiments by providing baselines to assess behavioral changes from objectively defined structural characteristics of real life prisons. In passing, I should add that one reason why there may have been less violence in this replication than in the SPE was the culturally determined afternoon tea break for all participants. Perhaps this procedure should be more widely instituted in all our prisons.

BBC-TV "The Experiment" as a Failure to Replicate

I declined the invitation to serve as a scientific consultant for a recreation of the SPE as a made-for-Reality-TV movie disguising itself as "science" on the BBC2 channel. It would be unethical to allow the study to achieve the full dramatic intensity that occurred in the SPE—one obvious reason for undertaking a Reality-TV show. Moreover, with the necessary ethical safeguards installed to prevent that outcome, the television production would likely become boring. Given their corporate commitment to proceed, I recommended, and they instituted, an around-the-clock external ethics committee given the power to terminate the study, which included a trusted British colleague, Mark McDermott (East London University). Two respected British social psychologists were in charge of organizing this experimental recreation (Steve Reicher, and S. Alexander Haslam).

Let me briefly describe the main features of their study and the “show time” production aspects of the program, and then offer some critical analysis of "scientific" conclusions that are being advanced from this kind of TV-experiment. Fifteen adult men (aged 22-44) from the United Kingdom were recruited through national ads for "The Experiment" that were headlined, "How well do you really know yourself?" Those selected from 500 who answered the ad would take part in a "university-backed social science experiment to be shown on TV" that promised, "to change the way you think." The volunteers were warned that they would be expected to experience the following, "exercise, tasks, hardship, hunger, solitude and anger." Nine were randomly assigned (allegedly) to be prisoners, and 6 to play their guards. They were given background questionnaires, and some of them were “visually evaluated” by BBC staff, I assume to select some who would be interesting characters for viewers to watch. A high-tech, good-looking, clearly expensive prison set was constructed at the George Lucas sound stage of BBC's Elstree studios (Hertfordshire) to allow monitoring by the researchers, the ethics committee, and, of course, to achieve optimal audio and video recording at all times. The study was projected to last 10 days but was terminated a few days sooner. After considerable editing, the research was broadcast (May, 2002) on BBC television in a series of four one-hour programs entitled, "The Experiment" (see Koppel & Mirsky, 2002).

After they entered the mock prison, prisoners were given orange jump suits, with lapel microphones attached, a prisoner number, and their heads were shaved. Three of them occupied each of the attractive cells provided with books and games. Unlike the SPE, the police did not arrest the prisoners, and there was no prison-like institutional hierarchy--only the two experimenters above the guards. The guards wore military style uniforms, and lived in separate guards' quarters. Curiously, there were no pre-arranged guard rules governing what prisoners must and must not do.

Let's fast forward to the end of the study and its remarkable conclusion: The prisoners dominated the guards! The guards became "increasingly paranoid, depressed and stressed and complained most of being bullied” Repeat, not the prisoners but the guards were distressed by their experiences in this Reality Show. Several of the guards couldn't take it any more and quit; none of the prisoners did so. The prisoners soon established the upper hand, working as a team to undermine the guards, to challenge and tease them, and even limit their access to the prisoners’ cells, and to demand and get better food. Then everyone got together and decided to form a peaceful "commune;" however, several dissident prisoners disrupted that meeting. Just before the program was ended prematurely, a coup was about to take place to create a more authoritarian version of the rule of the guards to replace this New Age mockery of a prison.

What is the external validity of such events in any real prison any where in the world? In what kind of prisons are the prisoners in charge? How could these results be at such variance with those of the SPE? Instead of simply outlining major differences between the BBC study and SPE, which could account for these opposite outcomes, the researchers have challenged the validity and generalizability of SPE's findings in many scientific articles.

I would like to highlight a few key points in analyzing what went wrong in this "experiment" and indicate how the TV component undermined any evidence-based conclusions that could be drawn from it. I will also mention some reactions of the participants themselves that also question the study's basic premises. (My fuller critique was published in the British Journal of Social Psychology.)

Random Assignment

If it were really done, it was done poorly because the prisoners looked the part, and were clearly bigger, stronger, and tougher than the more effete guards. The prisoners' backgrounds were very different from those of the guards: ex-crack addict, martial arts expert, security expert, former army officer, and the only black participant. They had more “street smarts” to begin, and they used assertive Machiavellian tactics to counter the guards' authority. They seemed to have been chosen from among the hundreds of applicants by “central casting” in order to more nearly resemble the image of “the convict” in the mind of the general public. To replace guards who quit the study, the researchers brought in a labor negotiator who actively arranged for peaceful reorganization of the prisoner-guard confrontations. We can assume he was not part of the randomly selected guards.

Failure to Create a Culture of Psychological Imprisonment

Rather than working to create a functional simulation typical of most medium to high security prisons (as we did in SPE and Lovibond et al. did in Australia), the researchers constantly did just the opposite. The participants were reminded daily that they were in an experiment, and that they were being recorded for a subsequent BBC-TV show that friends, family and co-workers would see. On the one hand, prisoners heads were shaved, an anonymity tactic, but the guards never referred to them by their numbers, only by their names (as in the Lovibond et al., Individualization regime), nor did they force long counts to recite those numbers endlessly. Despite their common uniforms, those prisoners with flashy tattoos were allowed to wear undershirts that revealed them in all their glory for TV close-ups – an individuating tactic. The prison activities were interrupted each day to complete psychological questionnaires, for regular intercom announcements from the "Experimenters," and for various participants to leave the Yard and their cells to talk to the researchers and the imagined TV audience in the "Diary Room," which is like the "Confessional Room" in other reality TV shows. The experimenters interrupt the development of participants becoming socialized into their roles by intervening at the end of the first day by announcing their "contest" to determine which prisoner would be allowed to switch roles and become a guard later on--based on "good behavior." Any sense of power differentials and categorical differences between the two groups was instantly muted and muddled. At a number of points throughout, the nature of "the experiment" is explicit: A guard reminds the prisoners that the experimenters are watching them, and that he has informed them about an incident in this cell. In turn, a prisoner reminds a guard that this is an experiment, while another tells a guard that they might be experimenting on him.

Heisenberg Indeterminacy (Uncertainty) Principle

Sometimes the very act of measuring and recording a phenomenon changes its nature in unpredictable ways. It seems evident that most of the participants knew that most of the time what they said and did was under the scrutiny of the experimenters and the TV producers. There are scenes in the privacy of prison cells in which prisoners are talking to each other, but always talk into their lapel mikes, to achieve a good recording, likely following orders by the TV producers. Anticipating the national televised screening of these events surely changed the behavior of one of the chief guards, Tom Q, a millionaire, hi-tech CEO. He was always cognizant of the fact that what he and the other guards did was being documented for later viewing by family, friends, and co-workers. Alone with his fellow guards he reminds them of what happened in Nazi Germany when people got too much involved in their roles. Later, trying to defuse tensions, he says to all the participants: "there should be two winners, both groups of guards and prisoners, and at the end (of the experiment) we all go to the pub and have a drink together." He does not want to be a guard, and he proposes a revolution against the experimenters by establishing equality between the two groups. He wants the TV world to perceive him as a “good guard,” but in any real prison he would be merely a “worthless guard.”

Unreality of “The Experiment” based on its Televised Programs

The 4 hours of actual TV programming required selection from the nearly 200 hours of recorded "data." If this is the document from which we are to understand what really happened, we need to know who was in charge of the selection, and what were their priorities. What we do know is that following a test screening by the producers for the participants, the prisoners objected to the way in which they were being portrayed as stupid and less in charge than they were. They demanded to look better — and then the film was reedited to satisfy these objections! One prisoner, still unhappy with the final cut, told a reporter: "The TV show concentrates on the Big Brother aspect--the funny and sad moments-- rather than the science. I think a lot of the more serious side has been cut out because it would make boring TV." Another participant voiced a similar complaint about what was shown on national television: "They said it was meant to be a thorough, scientific program, but it just looked like a poor man's Big Brother." [Big Brother was a popular Reality TV show at the time in Britain.]

I have detailed many other criticisms of this and related ‘pseudo-experiments’ in a scientific rebuttal that challenges media productions of experiments that are constrained by commercial values that typically rule over scientific ones. The researchers use this TV experiment to challenge the SPE’s account of the intensity of role-playing, of situational power, and the tyranny of abusive guards as a consequence of their dominating status. They argue that prisons can be models of harmonious dynamics between prisoners and guards, as shown in their BBC-TV Experiment. I wholeheartedly endorse that goal, but wonder what it would take to rig real prisons to achieve what they were able to rig in their show time mock prison.

I would like to end this section with a postscript based on my personal contact with one of the prisoner ringleaders of the end-game coup, Philip Bimpson from Liverpool, who offered this insider's perspective on “The Experiment.”

"The prisoners won because they had organized themselves quicker than the guards; their subversive actions and organizational skills outwitted the guards who were dis-organized in their new surroundings. They did not understand that they had to organize themselves and form a set of rules that they all agreed on. The prisoners had a common enemy, The Guards, so they had only one target. The guards had many subversive individual groups to contend with. The prisoners escaped at night by force/not stealth. This caused the prisoners and guards to form a commune -- against the experimenters' will.... I think the group is being exploited by the B.B.C. for commercial gain. Me and my new friends in the group joined the experiment for the furtherance of science & not to be used as a form of cheap entertainment." (Personal email communication, 26 Feb. 2002; supplemented by a personal exchange, Glasgow 10 October 2004)

SPE as Warning Against Power Abuses: The SERE Flipped Switch

Two of the unexpected uses of our research have been in Women's shelters and in the Navy's SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). Several directors of shelters for women and their children who are being protected from abusive mates have informed me that they use our "Quiet Rage" video to illustrate the ease with which masculine power can become abusive and destructive. This helps these women not to blame themselves for their abuse, but to better understand the situational factors that transformed their once loving mates into such abusing criminals. The experiment has also become absorbed into some versions of feminist theory of gender relations based on power.

Every branch of the military has a version of the SERE program. It was developed after the Korean War to teach those captured by the enemy how to withstand and resist extreme forms of coercive interrogation and abuse. Central to the training is the psychological and physical hardship trainees experience for days within a mock prisoner-of-war camp. This intense, grueling simulation prepares them to better cope with the terrors they might face if they are captured and tortured.

I have been informed by several sources in the Navy, that the SPE's message of the ease with which command power can become excessive has been made explicit in their training through using both our video and web site. This serves to warn the SERE trainer-captors against the impulse to "go over the top" in abusing their "captives." So one use of the SPE is to guide training in "guard" restraint in a setting that gives permission for guards to abuse others "for their own eventual good."

However, on the Other Hand: The SERE program as practiced by the Army at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been indicted by a number of critics as now being misused by the Pentagon. They argue that top officials have 'flipped the switch' from focusing on ways to increase resistance by captured American soldiers to developing effective interrogation techniques to use against captured "enemy noncombatants" and other assumed enemies of America. These techniques have migrated from the military SERE programs to Guantanamo Bay Prison, known as Gitmo, according to several accounts.

American law professor, M. Gregg Bloche, and Jonathan H. Marks, British barrister and bioethics fellow have condemned the use of these interrogation procedures that have been developed in part by behavioral scientists and physicians. They argue that, "by bringing SERE tactics and the Guantanamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora's box of potential abuse...the SERE model's embrace by the Pentagon's civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers."

Investigative reporter, Jane Mayer, in a New Yorker essay, "The Experiment", provides a fuller account. She raises a host of ethical issues about the use of health-care consultants in assisting with developing interrogation tactics that are based on exploiting the psychic weaknesses of detainees in Gitmo. These Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or BSCT's ('Biscuits' in military jargon) consist of "operational behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists (who) are essential in developing integrated interrogation strategies and assessing interrogation intelligence production," according to a 2003 internal report by General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Gitmo. Mayer concludes her investigation into the role of these civilian professionals in aiding the Pentagon to find optimal ways to stress and break detainees' resistance as challenging core values of the medical profession.

"Exerting psychic stress is, of course, the goal of the SERE program. To the extent that scientists and doctors are implicated in the process, Jonathan Moreno, the bioethicist, worries that "Guantanamo is going to haunt us for a long time." He said, 'the Hippocratic oath is the oldest ethical code we have. We might abandon our morality about other professions. But the medical profession is sort of the last gasp. If we give that up, we've given up our core values.'" (p. 71)

The American Psychological Association developed a task force to address these issues of psychological ethics and national security (PENS) that issued a report in June 2005. In its monthly magazine, Monitor on Psychology, APA took a strong stand on the ethics involved in such cases. "APA has spoken consistently, forcefully and unambiguously against any psychologist engaging in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. It is unethical and antiethical to our role and values for a psychologist to engage in these behaviors at an time, at any place, for any reason." [However, that does not address the subtler issue of the ethics of giving expert information to interrogators that exploits the psychological vulnerabilities of those being interrogated. See my critical commentary on PENS]

Crossovers into Popular Culture

Three examples of how our experiment has crossed the boundary from the ivy tower into the realms of music, theater and art come from a rock group, a German movie, and the art of a Polish artist whose "art form" was exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale.

"Stanford Prison Experiment" [minus the "The"] is the name of a rock band from Los Angeles whose intense music is "a fusion of punk and noise," according to their leader, who learned about the SPE as a student at UCLA. Having heard their music and "hung out" with the quartet at their concert at San Francisco's famous Fillmore auditorium, I can attest to their high energy and tympanically destructive tendencies. One of their records (on World Domination label) closes with a long speech by Noam Chomsky on class war. The band is considered to be "The Vulgarian Connoisseurs of New Noisecore." That is surely a wow!

"Das Experiment" A German Thriller Movie

I realized that something was terribly wrong, when a few years ago, I was overwhelmed by an avalanche of emails from Germany attacking the SPE as unethical -- after all these years? -- and attacking me for allowing rape, murder and mayhem to go unchecked in my research. Some graduate students wrote that they were considering giving up psychology as a career if it allowed such horrible abuses in research. Hello! Achtung!

I soon discovered that they were responding to a movie that had just been released in Germany (2001) which began with the introduction: "This story is inspired by incidents that occurred during a psychological study at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California in 1971." Without naming names, it was obvious that it was the SPE and me to which this preface to the film was referring. Promotional materials for the film left no doubt about its source, and made extensive reference to our publications and web site. They even provided images from our study -- without ever consulting with Stanford University officials or me.

This attribution of "Das Experiment" to the SPE gives legitimacy and a real-world quality to this "fantasy," as the scriptwriter called it. It purposely confuses viewers about what did happen in our study and what liberties were taken by the producers for the sake of sensationalism. The opening scenes of the film are reminiscent of the SPE: volunteers are selected to role-play prisoner and guards in a mock prison; pre-selection procedures are explained; outfitting in uniforms, rules, and so forth are established. But, as the situation begins to get out of hand, the senior researcher suddenly leaves (for a convention?) so that his assistant, the beautiful Jutta, is in charge.

She tells a guard that she is going to pull the plug on the study because some prisoners are going berserk (one is chewing up his own hand), and the guards are torturing prisoners. That guard strips her naked, rapes her, imprisons her, and gives the guards total control. At that point, they start to really brutalize the prisoners; a good guard who comes to their aid is beaten to a pulp and turned into a prisoner. Prisoners try to escape, are caught in a violent confrontation, and finally, guards and prisoners begin to murder each other. They all wander about dazed in a huge tunnel. In the last scene, as the sun sets on a couple lying on a beach, we see the protagonist (a prisoner-journalist preparing to write a story about "the experiment") and his sexy girlfriend (previously seen having intercourse), the evening news rolls down a TV screen. It flashes the hot news of the day: "2 dead, 3 injured"... "Experiment got out of control after 2 days"..."District Attorney investigating manslaughter charges"... "Could have been prevented if experiment was aborted earlier." To be sure, this adds a very realistic touch to this totally unreal portrayal. Then fade to black. The end; nothing more. No debriefing of participants or audience.

By exploiting gratuitous sex and violence throughout the movie, having a top German director, and famous leading actor, and then providing an alleged link to the SPE, this mock prison film has had great commercial success and worldwide worldwide distribution.

Stanford University attorneys made the distributor remove the preface that connected the film to the SPE (but only after 200 prints had been distributed). I debated with the screenwriter and lead actor on stage at San Francisco's Castro Theater after its premier showing, contending that the story had purposely mixed actual elements from the SPE with sex and violence so that the audience could not determine what was pure artistic fantasy and what actually happened.

Although some viewers found the film exciting, the movie was panned in critical reviews, such as these from two well-known British film critics. The Observer reviewer concluded, "'The Experiment' is an improbable thriller of no great originality that offers itself as a fable of national (possibly universal) inclination toward authoritarian fascism." Harsher was the reviewer from The Guardian: " Any episode of Big Brother would have had more insight than this silly and obtuse nonsense." American film critic, Roger Ebert extracted one valuable lesson from the movie, that applies to the SPE as well, "Perhaps uniforms turn us into packs, led by the top dog. There are few strays."

"Repetition" A Polish Experimental Art Form Recreates The SPE

A Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski, one of the most radical and controversial figures on the European art scene, has made a 46-minute film, "Repetition," ("Powtorzenie" in Polish) that highlights the seven days his paid volunteers spent in his mock prison. The film was screened every hour, on the hour, to large audiences in the Polish pavilion (June, 2005) at the Venice Biennale, the world's oldest celebration of contemporary art.

According to one reviewer, this film, "suggests that Zimbardo's experiment, which has as much intuition as strictly scientific method in its design, may have had the makings of a work of art.... In the simulated prison, however, artistic decorum soon gets left behind. The 'game' achieves a momentum of its own, so completely wrapping up its players in its dynamic that it starts to touch them at the core. Guards get more brutal and controlling. The disobedient are put in solitary; all heads are shaved. At this point a few prisoners, rather than simply seeing all this as annoying play that they can bear with for as long as it takes (at $40 a day), see it as a genuinely evil situation and quit the 'experiment' for good."(Pp. C1, 5)

Therefore, even though this demonstration was made in full awareness of its artificiality by a group of unemployed middle-aged men, and under a bank of video cameras that recorded the events, the role-playing simulation achieved a reality not unlike that achieved by the SPE.

Two additional aspects of this experimental art form deserve mention here; the dynamic relationship between art viewer and the cinema, and the personal reactions reported to me by the "worst" guard in that artistic experiment.

Art critic, Blake Gopnik, points out a curious similarity between simulated prisoners trapped in their roles and an audience trapped in its role. "There's even an interesting parallel between our experience and theirs. We know we can leave the cinema at any time when the film gets dull or hard to take, as it often does, and yet most of us stay, because of a kind of social contract built around the making and viewing of art." (p. C5)

Just how realistic and powerful can a simulated prison experience become when it is made for art's sake and not experimental psychology? One of the men who played a guard role has written to me about the enduring impact of his transformation. He had expected to be a good guard and yet became the worst, most feared guard in the prison. Three months after his role-playing ended, he continues to obsess about "the really bad things" he did to the prisoners; he has lost interest in many things in his life, even sex, and reports that, "At the end of the experiment, I shaved all my hair in order to clean up the dark and evil side of myself." (Personal email communications, June 23, 24, 2005)

He describes his transformation in these terms:

"When I got the message to be a guard, I felt very good and pleased. I thought I will be good in the prison and will be good to the prisoners. I thought that I will try to make prisoners behave well and properly in the prison.... However, when I was really in the prison, I realized that I started to be very "serious" and "harsh" to them as a prison guard.... I punished prisoners, their numbers are 810, 574, 510. I still remember their numbers.... I shaved their hair on the last day.... Sometimes I really wanted to kick them and hurt them, but I felt happy cause I didn't do this to them.... [The movie Director made him Leader of the Guards because he was the worst prison guard, one whom the prisoners had given a negative nickname.] "When I became leader of the prison, I felt it was the last moment when I controlled my own feelings. And it was the last moment when I felt like a human being not an animal. So I decide to end this experiment by myself."

Which he did heroically! So art imitates experiments; experiments imitate life, which may be nothing more than our extended role-playing in some grand experiment being conducted by unknown investigators without our informed consent.

I had the opportunity to interact with artist Zmijewski during a US screening of this film, which included a panel discussion. What I found most fascinating was his answer to my question, "In what sense was this art?" He claimed it is an "art that creates knowledge," which of course, is what I claim social science research is all about, but not as an art form. It is a curious reminder of the position of Marcel Duchamp, one of the founders of the DADA European art movement in the 1920's. He argued that virtually anything could be art, even if it does not look as if it is a "work of art," including commercial, readymade objects. Picasso and Andy Warhol later demonstrated his point in their constructions. Please see also Tanya Zimbardo's perceptive critique of this screening of Repetition in the Wattis Institute at California College of Art in San Francisco.

©2006-2009, Philip G. Zimbardo