The August of 1971 turned out to be an amazingly pivotal point in my life — much more than I realised at the time. I had just completed my doctorate at Stanford University and was preparing to start my new job as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. In my personal life, I was romantically involved with Philip Zimbardo and we were considering marriage. Although I had heard about plans for a prison simulation study, I did not pay much attention. Ordinarily I might have been more interested, but I was in the process of moving and my focus was on preparing for my first job. However, when Philip asked me, as a favour, to conduct some interviews with the study participants (i.e. the ‘prisoners’ and the ‘guards’), I agreed to help.
The interviews were to be done on Friday, nearly a week after the start of the study, to assess the subjective impact of participation on both the guards and the prisoners. I went to the Stanford campus on the Thursday night to visit the ‘prison’ and to get some sense of what was going on.
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