The Baffling Gender Politics of Netflix’s New Stanford Prison Experiment

From left: Chris Lee, Shavonnah Jefferson, and Kiana Goana in The New Stanford Prison Experiment —Netflix This article discusses all six episodes of Netflix’s The New Stanford Prison Experiment.

For decades now, scholars have argued over what—if anything—we should have gleaned from the Stanford Prison Experiment .

That it was unethical to place two dozen male college students in a university basement repurposed as a prison, designate a few of them guards and the rest prisoners, and encourage the former to discipline the latter, was apparent by the time its mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, ended what was supposed to be a two-week exercise after only six days.

As the extent of Zimbardo’s manipulation came to light, the 1971 study lost credibility in academic circles, even as its pop-cultural legend kept growing.

Fifty-five years after it was conducted, perhaps the only definitive conclusion to draw from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the Stanford Prison Experiment is not worth repeating.

But just try telling that to the reality-TV machine, let alone a platform currently at work on the third, all-celebrity season of a competition series that cheerfully (and, of course, non-lethally) recreates the horrors of its international hit anticapitalist battle royale thriller Squid Game .

The New Stanford Prison Experiment , Netflix’s take on a project that was always more convincing as improvisational theater than as scientific research, isn’t even television’s first crack at Zimbardo’s study.

The BBC got there first with The Experiment , in 2002, whose earnest attempts to correct for the original’s missteps yielded a more nuanced, if still inherently flawed, look at authority.

That the Netflix version of what can now be best understood as a reboot of a famous franchise feels less like social psychology and more like a high-concept season of Big Brother is no surprise.

What’s most perplexing is its choice to incorporate female participants in a limited way—and its failure to make any real sense out of what they bring to the experience.

Aware that the televised resurrection of a notoriously inhumane experiment was bound to draw scrutiny (the mere announcement of the show’s existence touched off a wave of incredulity ), the producers of the six-episode series take pains to make both their safety precautions and their high-mindedness visible.

Instead of a retrofitted academic building, the inmates are sequestered in a real housing pod of a Georgia correctional facility.

The 30 voluntary participants are said to come from all walks of life, though what we find out about their backgrounds is generally limited to hometown, racial identity, and line of work.