The Stanford Prison Experiment is a 2015 film that focuses on the real-life prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The prison experiment involved the participating students roleplaying as prison guards and inmates for an extended period of time, and it drew media attention and controversy after the professor in charge, Philip Zimbardo, went public with his findings.
2015's The Stanford Prison Experiment is not the first adaptation of this real-life experiment's events. Other adaptations include Italian filmmaker Carlo Tuzii's La gabbia, 2001's German-language Das Experiment, and the 2010 Hollywood remake of that film, titled The Experiment.
The film is available to stream on multiple platforms in the United States. These include Paramount+ with Showtime, FuboTV, The Roku Channel, Amazon Prime Video, and Apple TV+.
The Stanford Prison Experiment has numerous streaming options
The Stanford Prison Experiment is available for streaming and rent on a variety of platforms. Therefore, viewers in the United States have a number of payment plans they can choose from.
The Paramount+ with Showtime bundle is a subscription service that has a 7-day free trial. Following this, viewers can pay a subscription fee of $12.99 a month. They can also purchase a Paramount+ subscription through Apple TV.
It is also available via an AMC+ subscription, which also has a 7-day free trial, following which the service costs $4.99 a month. In addition, an AMC+ subscription also grants access to AMC original series such as The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
The film is also available on the IFC Films channel on Amazon Prime Video, where viewers can subscribe to it for $5.99 per month. There is no free trial available for the service.
For free and ad-supported options, viewers can check out The Roku Channel, Kanopy, Pluto TV, and Plex. Additionally, The Stanford Prison Experiment is also available for rent and purchase on Prime Video and Apple TV, with a rental costing $3.99 and a purchase costing $12.99.
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The Stanford Prison Experiment is a fictionalized portrayal of real events
The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on a real-life experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971. The experiment was led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, who recruited participants from Palo Alto by publishing newspaper advertisements that offered $15 a day to male students for participating.
The experiment involved the volunteers being assigned roles as prisoners or guards after undergoing a psychological assessment. The experiment was designed to simulate the living conditions of a prison and analyze how people reacted when put into positions of power over others.
The original plan was to have the experiment run for two weeks, and it began with the real police of Palo Alto "arresting" the prisoner volunteers. These volunteers were subsequently placed under the authority of the guard volunteers and experienced increasingly brutal treatment over the next five days.
Fellow psychologist Christina Maslach visited the experimental prison as part of an evaluation and was so unnerved by the environment there that she convinced Zombardo to discontinue the experiment. Following this, Zombardo published the findings of his research in the American Psychologist Journal.
Following the publication of its findings, the experiment created a media firestorm. The conditions of Zombardo's prison and what they revealed about human nature have become topics of heated debate in the decades since.
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The Stanford Prison Experiment is available for streaming, rent, and purchase.