Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

Part of the play’s drama comes from the contrast: Look at these nice college boys and how quickly they turn to monsters! But the experiment was in Jordan Hall. From the perspective of the state, college boys were an essential national resource; they were already doing war work. So was Zimbardo.xvii The situation was broader than Zimbardo understood it to be, even in retrospect, with decades of distance. Turned into jailers, led by a Stanford scientist, those young men behaved exactly as California’s white settlers usually have: with a useful excess of sadism.