Netflix Drops Stanford Prison Experiment Series Trailer — SkimNews
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- Netflix unveiled the first trailer for the upcoming unscripted series "The New Stanford Prison Experiment," showing participants transported to a real prison and assigned roles as guards or inmates.
- The series debuts Oct. 21 with a first season of six 45-minute episodes.
- The show's official premise poses the central question: whether ordinary people inevitably conform to assigned power roles, or whether empathy, morality, and individuality can resist those forces.
- Alfred Street Industries produces the series, with Jane Lipsitz, Dan Cutforth, Nan Strait, Dan Volpe, Jeff Grogan, and Mike Odair executive producing.
- The original Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford, originally planned as a two-week study but terminated after less than a week when guards began abusing prisoners.
- The 1971 experiment and similar studies from that era directly led to the adoption of stricter ethical rules to prevent harm to human research participants.
Why it matters: By recreating Zimbardo's 1971 study as a six-episode Netflix series, the production puts a global streaming audience inside one of psychology's most ethically fraught experiments — a study whose original findings on conformity-to-power directly catalyzed modern human-subject protection rules.
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