Author: Jamie Chamberlin

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” movie: What happened in the film that didn’t happen in real life?

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The new feature film “The Stanford Prison Experiment” is “about 90 percent accurate,” said Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, at a showing of the film today as part of APA’s Film Festival.

At the screening, Zimbardo — who conducted the now-famous experiment in 1971 to simulate the conditions of prison and examine the power of social situations over individual personality — shared some of the differences between what really happened in the basement of the Stanford psychology building and what’s depicted in the film.

Among the greatest differences is that the movie shows one student being “arrested” by Palo Alto police at his home to begin the study, omitting the fact that all nine students assigned as prisoners were first taken to the Palo Alto police department after their arrests. There, they were booked, fingerprinted and held in a cell for several hours before they were taken to the university.

Other differences include:

• The Stanford professor who encounters Zimbardo as he is sitting outside the prisoners’ cells one night and asks, “What is the independent variable in your study? This is an experiment, right, not just a simulation?” is played by an older actor in the movie. In reality, the person who posed that question was Zimbardo’s same-age Stanford colleague and his Yale graduate school roommate – well-known experimental psychologist Gordon Bower, PhD.

• Zimbardo was never involved in the “parole hearings” held for prisoners as he is in the movie. Instead, some secretaries ran those meetings along with Carlo Prescott (who is featured in the film) — a man Zimbardo brought in to help with the experiment because he had recently been released from prison after serving 17 years.

• In the real study, there was less frequent physical abuse by the guards, Zimbardo noted. “The only physical abuse was during the rebellion when the guards broke in and the prisoners started attacking them,” he said.

Zimbardo told attendees that the experiment eventually led him to shift his area of research to shyness, which he studied for the next 20 years. “One of the messages of the study is the extent to which all prisons are prisons of the mind,” he said. “Shyness is a self-imposed psychological prison.”

He also said that he moved away from “creating evil” to “inspiring heroism” by launching the Heroic Imagination Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches children about heroism and promotes the use of social science research to teach people ways to resist bullying and oppression.

Zimbardo is now organizing a screening of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” for President Obama at the While House since the president recently made the first visit by a sitting president to a federal prison and is calling for prison reform.

“The Stanford Prison Experiment” is showing in theatres in limited release. Zimbardo will be answering attendees’ questions about the film online over the next few days. Email questions to .

Don’t Use ‘Hook-up Generation’ To Describe Today’s Youth

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Media coverage describing today’s youth as “the hook-up generation” seeking one-time sexual encounters over dating and relationships is inaccurate and “has really done a lot of damage for young people,” according to Debra Lynn Herbenick, PhD.

Two love hearts hanging on wooden texture background, valentines day card concept

Herbenick, of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, told attendees at APA’s Annual Convention in Toronto that while many of today’s youth say they feel they should want to pursue only casual sexual encounters, they actually want to date, find a relationship and experience a strong connection.

“Even with 14- to 17-year-olds, you see a strong interest in dating and being in love,” said Herbenick, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at Indiana University Bloomington, and one of the lead researchers behind the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. “Given statements like, ‘I would rather date someone I like or love than just hook up with someone casually,’ we had more than 80 percent of women and men agree or strongly agree with that statement.”

Two-thirds of respondents in that age group wanted to be in love within the next year, and three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds felt the same way, she said. But one-quarter of young men and one-third of young women reported that they feared that saying they wanted to be exclusive with someone would make them look clingy or needy.

“In terms of thinking how we connect with younger people, we need more models for … talking about meaning and connection and saying what you want and being who you are,” she said. “I think that sense of humanity is really lost for a lot of these younger people or hasn’t been part of the conversations that they’ve had.”

The NSSHB is the largest nationally representative survey of sexual health and behavior in the United States and includes 5,865 adolescents and adults between ages 14 and 94. At the session, Herbenick also reported findings from two additional studies she’s worked on — the 2015 Sexual Exploration in America Survey and the 2015 U.S. Survey of Women and Intimacy. These include the finding that “love factors into women’s protective behaviors during sex,” said Herbenick. She and her fellow researchers found that women who love their sexual partner but feel their partner doesn’t love them back are three-and-a-half times more likely to use a condom than women in mutual love. Women who are having sex with a partner they don’t love and don’t believe loves them back are five times more likely to use a condom, she said.

Herbenick blogs about the science of sexuality at http://mysexprofessor.com/

Help for Toronto’s Firefighters

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Four out of five firefighters will suffer a stress-related illness or absence sometime in their career, Toronto Fire Chief Jim Sales told attendees at APA’s Annual Convention in Toronto. “As of yesterday, I had 87 staff on long-term disability, and 60 percent of those are stress or anxiety related.”

In 2015, 29 first responders in the city have died by suicide and the Toronto Fire Service, which lost a firefighter to suicide in February, averages one to three suicides per year. A lack of mental health support from the department is partly responsible, said Sales. “Historically, fire services haven’t looked at the mental health side, at the ability to cope with the stress [firefighters] find on the job each and every day.”

Sales aims to turn that around by boosting mental health support throughout the department. Consulting with the Canadian Mental Health Commission and police, he is working to improve firefighters’ access to mental health services, enhance peer support programs, educate supervisors on how to provide support and create sick-leave policies that support mental health needs.
The fire service will also be committed to eliminating the shame often associated with seeking mental health services among firefighters, he said. “There’s a stigma attached to telling your boss or coworkers that you’re having an issue with a call — it’s considered weak,” he said. “We need to change that philosophy and make it understood that these things impact us all.”

Shift work can also add to the stress of an already-stressful profession. Toronto firefighters work eight 24-hour shifts per month, which can be hard on their families and make it difficult for supervisors to spot signs of mental distress. The department will build a health and wellness center that families can access and implement 24-hour follow-ups and check-ins with firefighters who have gone out on particularly difficult emergency calls.

“We want to be a leader in this area,” Sales said. “The old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? We need to be investing in that ounce.”