Playing with Cruelty: Pop Culture, Performativity, and the Stanford Prison Experiment
| Dates: | 4 June 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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Professor Stephen Reicher (University of St. Andrews) in conversation with Professor Stephen Scott-Bottoms (University of Manchester)
This special event marks the UK streaming launch of a new 3-part documentary series, The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth (National Geographic/Disney+). Social psychologist Stephen Reicher and theatre historian Stephen Scott-Bottoms are among the expert commentators featured in the series, alongside many of the original participants in Philip Zimbardo’s notorious “guards versus prisoners” role-play experiment of 1971. Here the two Steves will discuss what the series reveals, and consider some of the wider questions that it raises:
- What is the relationship between staged role-play and psychological reality?
- To what extent do psychologists lead or even ‘direct’ the events that unfold in their studies? (If the drama is framed as a theatre of cruelty, does cruelty necessarily follow?)
- What are the risks or advantages in popularising experimental outcomes through press and media narratives? Must one simplify in order to amplify?
This event will also feature a guest appearance – via Zoom – from Juliette Eisner, the director of the docuseries.
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Stephen Reicher is the Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Social Psychology at the University of St Andrews. He is an internationally recognised specialist on social identity, collective behaviour, intergroup conflict, and leadership influence. During the COVID-19 pandemic he was an outspoken member of the government’s independent scientific advisory group, SAGE. In 2002, Steve was co-lead researcher on the BBC’s partial reconstruction of the Stanford prison study, The Experiment.
Stephen Scott-Bottoms is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester. His recent book Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons, and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2024) re-examines some major psychological role-play experiments from the perspective of a theatre historian and performance theorist.
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John Casken Lecture Theatre
Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama
Bridgeford Street
Manchester
