Rethinking the ‘nature’ of brutality: Uncovering the role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment

Before considering our own answers to these questions, we would strongly recommend that readers listen to the interview and read the transcript for themselves. They will then be in a position to judge independently how this material speaks to the relative merits of a role versus an identity leadership account of the toxic behavior that unfolded in the SPE. Indeed, after we ourselves first heard the recording, we considered writing a much briefer paper in which we simply laid out the ‘role’ and ‘identity leadership’ accounts of the SPE and then asked readers to listen to the recording themselves and make up their own minds as to which is the more plausible analysis of events in Zimbardo and colleagues’ study.The reason for considering such a radical option is that the evidence here is not at all oblique or opaque. The tape, we think, speaks largely for itself (and that has been confirmed every time we have played it to groups of colleagues)

The recording can be found here