The Stanford Daily Magazine Vol. I II Issue 2 (11.14.18)

The Stanford Daily Magazine

VOLUME III

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Issue II

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NOVEMBER 14, 2018

A study of the

Stanford Prison Experiment

LITERARY BITES p. 8

FITZMORRIS p. 13

NAVY CYCLIST p.Issue25 2|1

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Contents

The Stanford Daily M AGAZINE

Volume III, Issue II November 14, 2018

News 16 Stanford prison experiment Philip Zimbardo’s most famous study falls under renewed scrutiny.

25 navy CYCLIST Meet one of the most unique members of the Class of 2021.

ARTS & LIFE 8 LiTERARY BITES Shana Hadi explores the gustatory affect of famous literary works.

SPORTS

MALIA MENDEZ/The Stanford Daily

From the navy to the farm Former Navy SEAL Nestor Walters joins Class of 2021 after many years of service.

–– p. 25

The GRIND

13 VOLLEYBALL

4 THANKSGIVING

Bobby Pragada follows the journey of women’s volleyball All-American Audriana Fitzmorris.

Emily Schmidt comments on spending the holiday in the USA as an international student.

29 COMMUNITY Avery Rogers unpacks the difficulties she faced in finding a community at Stanford.

Creative 31 cartoon Take a satirical look at the wonders of daily life.

32 CROSSWORD Solve puzzle master Grant Coalmer’s latest creation.

STAFF editor-in-Chief Courtney C. Douglas Executive Editor Josh Wagner MAGAZINE EDITOR Claire Wang Managing Editors Amir Abou-Jaoude, Gillian Brassil, Brian Contreras, Michael Espinosa, Holden Foreman, Dylan Grosz, Julia Ingram, Miso Kim, Khuyen Le, Anna-Sofia Lesiv, Erin Perrine, Olivia Popp, Bobby Pragada, Ashwin Ramaswami, Emily Schmidt, Nik Wesson LAYOUT Isabel Benak, Shirley Cai, Hee Jung Choi, Harry Cole, Maya Harris, Yifei He, Alex Huang, Mika Isayama, Maika Jones, Miso Kim, Sarah Kim, Anna Manafova, Ari Pefley, Jennifer Pham, Dina Safreno, Christina Shen, Josh Wagner, Daniel Wu Business manager Regan Pecjak ad sales manager Evan Gonzales Director of alumni development Arianna Lombard

On the cover: Guards cracked down on a rebellion on the second day of Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment by stripping prisoners and putting ringleaders in solitary confinement. Courtesy of Stanford Libraries.

Issue 2 | 3

Football, Black Friday and pumpkin pie:

International students’ take on Thanksgiving

I

f you came to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner (or more like a really late lunch), you’d realize almost immediately how obviously stereotypical the food, people and conversation are. To begin with, everyone arrives at least half hour earlier than promised to “beat the traffic.” They enter the house without knocking, arms full of appetizers and side dishes that need reheating. Obligatory hugs and kisses are exchanged with every person whether you’re related to them or not.

Then, every college-aged attendee is asked the following questions at least half a dozen times: How’s school going? Are you dating anyone?

Do you want me to set you up with [insert random person you’ve met maybe once]?

Do you have homework over break? Have you gotten sick at all? How’s the party scene?

When do you come home for winter break?

The conversation turns from an interrogation to a play-by-play narration of whatever football game is put on during appetizer hour. Everyone under the age of 25 takes this opportunity to scroll through other people’s celebratory Thanksgiving Instagram and Facebook posts. Eventually, the appetizers disappear, and eyes begin to drift from the TV to the kitchen. Those cooking the meal take the hint and announce that dinner will be ready in five minutes (translation: 20-25

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by Emily Schmidt minutes because someone put the turkey in too late). The great migration to the dining room begins with the elders; they settle at the heads up of the so-called “adult table.”

Aunts and uncles fill in the rest of the seats.

The younger crowd occupies the “kids’ table” (FYI, the name has been a misnomer for years).

Someone gives a sappy Thanksgiving toast/ prayer/story before giving the rest of the family the go-ahead to take as many rounds of food as they can. In between large bites, relatives repeat the same stories from the year before (though the majority don’t remember). The “kids’ table” is mostly silent, except for the low chorus of Snapchat stories playing out loud.

After some time dirty dishes begin to pile high in the sink, and a variety of store-bought and homemade (but mostly store-bought) desserts are put out on the table. In a matter of minutes, all the dishes are partially eaten, their remains to be haphazardly wrapped up and forced into the hands of relatives taking an Irish exit.

While my sarcastic description of my family’s Thanksgiving suggests otherwise, I really do love sentiment behind the holiday. I’m just not sure I’d bring one of my international friends with me without first prefacing what they’re about to experience. I mean, American Thanksgivings really are unique experiences,

especially if you wake up at 3 a.m. the next morning to go Black Friday shopping. Many international students at Stanford don’t go home for the week-long break but instead stay on campus or go home with a friend.

As a result, numerous Resident Fellows, religious groups and student organizations hold Thanksgiving dinners if students want to share a home-cooked meal with the people who support them on campus.

In thinking about the variety of Thanksgiving options, I wondered what it would feel like to celebrate such an iconic American holiday for the first time. The earliest memory I have of Thanksgiving is of drawing hand turkeys in preschool. I can assure you it was exciting at the time, but I wanted to know whether international students felt a similar sense of excitement during their first Thanksgiving experience. And so, I spoke with five international students in my year to get their hard take on food, atmosphere and shopping, among other things.

HEE JUNG CHOI, MAIKA SATO JONES, CHRISTINA SHEN/The Stanford Daily

“Everyone I talked to really loves [Thanksgiving,] especially the fact that it’s completely secular and family-focused.”

Jack Ackerman ’20

Surprisingly, none of them was blown away or overwhelmed by the experience.

Thanksgiving is often portrayed in TV series and movies (“Friends” has 10 Turkey Daythemed episodes). On some level, all of them knew what to expect coming into the holiday. Letícia Souza ’20, whose hometown is Pindamonhangaba, Brazil, didn’t feel any sense of expected grandiosity.

“Thanksgiving [didn’t] feel so big to me,” she says. “I watched many movies and series portraying it, but it feels like a family holiday.

Since my family [didn’t] celebrate with me, not even through FaceTime, I [didn’t] have the feeling I think I should have.”

The privilege of having those closest to you in attendance on the family-oriented holiday can make a tremendous difference in its relative importance. Although, for Emma Abdullah — who hails from Brest, France — having family in the U.S. didn’t really affect the way she celebrated Thanksgiving.

“I don’t think I particularly had a first impression. It seemed similar to a family gathering for other celebrations or just a large casual family meal. Everyone just hangs out and eats,” she says. “But I do like how it’s a national holiday dedicated to spending time together.”

For Keaton Ollech, who is from Victoria, Canada, American Thanksgiving wasn’t much different than its Canadian counterpart with respect to food, but the culture surrounding the holiday is much different. In Canada, the holiday is celebrated on the second Monday of October (Can you imagine Thanksgiving before Halloween?) to honor the autumn harvest. In addition, football isn’t an associated Canadian tradition, so people aren’t glued to the TV for a good portion of the afternoon and evening.

Both Abdullah and Souza likened the holiday to Christmas, and Jack Ackerman —

who comes from Bogotá, Colombia — thought its secularity was unique, considering his home country doesn’t have a holiday parallel to Thanksgiving.

“I celebrated my first Thanksgiving with a friend’s family,” Ackerman says. “His parents immigrated from Iran, so I didn’t expect them to celebrate [it]. I was also surprised how much everyone liked it. Everyone I talked to really loves it, especially the fact that it’s completely secular and family-focused.”

Aside from its negative, complicated roots, there is a certain beauty to Thanksgiving’s purpose of bringing people together and being thankful. Anyone is free to celebrate the holiday regardless of race, ethnicity or religion and make it their own. For example, Ackerman’s first Thanksgiving had an international twist.

Most of the food was Persian, except for the turkey. He loved everything but the gravy (I know!). And he wasn’t the only one who had mixed feelings about the food.

Souza, an extremely talented chef (and one of the winners of Stanford’s 15th Annual Cardinal Cook-Off), says, “The turkey felt kind of bland to me, but I think it is because I ate it only overdone. I would make a turkey that is moist in the inside and throw hot oil on top of it afterwards to have a crispy outside. Maybe add some bacon and onions to the side.”

Aye Chan Moe ’20 from Yangon, Burma also didn’t feel much excitement for the turkey.

“The homemade turkey from alumni didn’t change my life or anything, but the next year I had Thanksgiving dinner at Arrillaga, and I regretted not savoring the homemade one.”

Although some believe the turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie make Thanksgiving the best holiday, the hundreds of thousands who participate in Black Friday shopping may feel differently. I’ve personally never had the willpower to get up early enough, but I am

a fan of Cyber Monday. The possibility of having things stolen out of my hands or getting trampled by full-grown adults also doesn’t appeal to me (and several of the international students).

“Freshman year, I went to the Stanford Shopping Center for Black Friday, getting up extra early and arriving at 6:00 a.m.,” Ollech says. “There were hardly any people there, though, and many of the stories didn’t even have sales because they’re high-end boutiques that don’t use sales as a promotional tactic.”

In contrast, Souza felt Black Friday was totally worth the time and effort: “I love Black Friday! I am not wealthy, so I often wait until Black Friday to buy things I’ve wanted all year.

It is also a great day to check airplane tickets and save to go back home on winter break. I’m still proud of the price I paid for my Stanford bike as well.”

But like me, Chan Moe isn’t eager to hop on the Black Friday bandwagon. “I’ve never participated in Black Friday, but from what I’ve seen on TV, I don’t think I’d ever want to,” she says. “I just don’t think any discount is worth getting potentially hurt over, so I’ll stick to online shopping for now.”

With Thanksgiving break right around the corner, I hope that all international students have the chance to celebrate in their own way, whether that be watching a movie and eating a huge bowl of garlic mashed potatoes or having a drunken conversation with a friend about how much they’re thankful for corgis.

As long as there’s food and happiness, they’ve experienced an American Thanksgiving the right way.

Contact Emily Schmidt at egs1997@stanford. edu.

Issue 2 | 5

LITERARY BITES

by Shana Hadi

W

hen an author describes glistening plates of tender beef en daube or a beautifully arranged fruit bowl, we instinctively pay closer attention.

References to food and other mundane needs are sparse in most texts. Since readers understand the act of eating, and texts can only hold oh-so-many words, why waste your words as an author when you have other priorities?

Outside the realm of ideas, we accept food as a necessity and assign it no further importance beyond maintaining our bodily health. But in consuming food in bite-sized doses of literary excellence, we have the space in our minds (and stomachs) to consider more possibilities instead of greedily stuffing our faces with purple prose.

I’ll stop tantalizing you with this introductory appetizer and discuss three of my favorite works that use food, or the lack thereof, to further their respective goals.

“A Room of One’s Own” – Virginia Woolf This whole essay expands on the historical disempowerment of women and their subsequent invisibility in the Western literary canon. Woolf posits that a woman must have “money and a room of her own” in order to pursue writing, and illustrates her argument through exploring the various “unsolved

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problems” of women writers that traditionally men rarely face.

In part one is where we lay our scene: Woolf considers the inferiority of resources and funding for women’s colleges, especially in comparison to exclusively male institutions (at the time). Her female protagonist, whom she dubbed a common “Mary,” has the fortune of lunching at one such school, “Oxbridge.”

Perhaps humorously (though very relevant for this article), Woolf notes that while a conventional novelist convinces readers of

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

Virginia Woolf

a memorable meal while “seldom spar[ing] a word for what was eaten… as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever,” she intends to defy convention.

Woolf then presents us with towering descriptions of soles with “brown spots like the spots on the flank of a doe,” partridges with “a retinue of sauces,” “sprouts, foliated as rosebuds,” and “wineglasses [that had] flushed yellow and had flushed crimson.”

Such richness of the food in description and quality captures our senses and imagination; as readers, we eat the food alongside Mary in a metaphorical sense. In turn, this profusion of figurative language opens us to deeper contemplation; beyond relating “retinue” with connotations of grandeur and “doe” and “rosebuds” with nature, we also consume words to appreciate their beauty and their role in forging these mental connections. Indeed, Woolf shows how the meal produces the “rich yellow flame of rational discourse” and a general feeling that “we are all going to heaven.”

The meal leads into fruitful conversation that continues “agreeably, freely, amusingly” until Mary is startled by a tailless cat.

Mary, inspired from eating such hearty fare, decides to peruse a book of Tennyson poems to reflect on pre- and post-WWI societal norms.

As she walks back to the women’s college, Fernham, her (and by extension, our) mind spirals with excerpts of the poems she read, rarefied thoughts on the beauty of nature, the glory of poets like Tennyson and Rossetti, and then — “Here was my soup.” With this simple phrase, gone are the lofty adjectives, which Woolf left behind at the description of Oxbridge. Mary returns to the underfunded women’s college for dinner, and as she dines she cannot help but notice the “plain gravy soup,” the “homely trinity” of beef with greens and potatoes, and custard with prunes “stringy as a miner’s heart.” Though for Mary there was no reason to complain when coal-miners receive far less,

Woolf makes no more comparisons to royalty or transcendence, only relating the mundanity of “daily food” to the suffering of the average workman.

After Mary finishes, Woolf writes, “That was all. The meal was over.” And Mary’s night is, in effect over, as are her ruminations.

With the contrast of the Fernham dinner to the luncheon at Oxbridge, our understanding of food and its importance informs how we interpret this passage. We need to see the concrete Oxbridge luncheon, in order to understand what Fernham lacks in comparison: funding, and how this affects their institutional offerings. In the absence of rich language describing Fernham, we experience the visceral sense of loss, of the sensory imagery of the luncheon and Mary’s resulting poetic reflections.

Yes, Mary’s dinner was better than nothing, but when we recall the lavishness of the luncheon, we wonder at “what effect poverty has on the mind” and “what effect wealth has on the mind.” If good physical food also serves as higher quality “brain food” for thoughts and ideas, then the accompanying axiom is food of lower quality leads to a less consistent production of these reflections. Everyone needs to eat, and at such drastic price points, we see how such disparities in resources also lead to educational disparities that increase over time.

As Woolf notes, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.” (Perhaps we can view the adage “you are what you eat” with this context in mind.)

And the cycle continues when alumni return to donate to respective college’s endowment, as the original differences in education and success trickle downward into the daily lives of the students, with limited funding dictating the quality of a meal, the quality of thought, the quality of education, and so on. (Chew on that, Stanford students, the next time you grab a bite to eat.)

“Fasting” – Rumi (translated into English

by Coleman Barks) While Woolf links excellent food with excellence of thought directly, 13th century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi distinguishes between material and spiritual food in the poem “Fasting.” Among his many ecstatic poems (and quite a few involve food, as in this lovely line, God “hides the apples of meaning among branches of letters, leaves of words”), I find this work particularly compelling for the layered relationships between food, music, and the theme of tawhid (union with the Beloved).

On a literal level, Rumi discusses the joys of fasting, of the “hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.” Unlike “A Room of One’s Own” in which a higher quality meal leads to greater quality of thought, Rumi presents us with the opposite, that a productive mind comes from an empty stomach.

He notes that only when “the brain and belly are burning clean / with fasting” can a “new song [come] out of the fire.” As we are no longer weighed down with sluggishness from digesting food (seriously, the role of the parasympathetic nervous system is “rest and digest”), “the fog clears” and we can break away from the tediousness of a daily routine.

Rumi suggests that with the absence of physical food in our bodies, we unearth our ability to undertake more rarefied, creative pursuits. By being empty of material food, we search for fulfillment through other means beyond material consumption, so we can “cry like reed instruments cry” and “write secrets with the reed pen.” We become spiritually nourished through focusing on our self-control and disengagement with the world. Otherwise, we are “stuffed” lutes that can produce “no music,” too occupied with our plates to search

Issue 2 | 7

for wisdom and enlightenment.

However, an interesting complication arises in how Rumi uses “tasteful” language to illustrate the transcendence that fasting brings. While he emphasizes the benefits of abstaining from food, and indirectly material consumption, he still relates the spiritual benefits of fasting with the convention of delicious food as physically fulfilling.

In the first line, Rumi draws on our understanding of “sweetness” to signify how fasting can bring its just desserts, even with the pangs of hunger. Though a faster would refrain from indulgence in sweets, Rumi relates the positive connotation of “sweetness” with the faster’s maintenance of self-control. The faster’s commitment becomes its own kind of spiritual fulfillment, akin to physical fulfillment through consuming a tasty treat.

Later in the poem, he describes the faster’s other reward as “a table [that] descends to your tents, / Jesus’ table … / spread with other food, better than the broth of cabbages.” Though fasting is literally denying food from oneself, Rumi metaphorically connects the ultimate benefit of fasting as bringing one closer to heaven – and breaking bread with Jesus. The prize for abstaining from food in the material world is later consuming the food of heaven with the divine itself.

Rumi also uses traditional conceptions of the quality of food to give us an evocative metaphor on how earthly consumption compares to that of the divine. Cabbages (presumably and personally) rank fairly low on the universal scale for taste and enjoyment. By ending the

poem with emphasis on how this spiritual food far outranks “the broth of cabbages,” he relates all the food of earth with the sensation of a watery, potentially nauseating soup. Whatever the state of culinary excellence in the material world, they cannot compare with the delights of Jesus’ table — and fasting is the only way to receive an invitation.

But beyond the comparison of fine dining with mystical enlightenment, I also find that Rumi makes us more mindful of the simple moments in between our utensils reaching downward to our plates and upward to our mouths. After all, how often do we really stop to think about what we eat and why we eat such particular foods?

Here, Rumi associates the self-control of fasting with a clear mind unweighted by the products of the world, and this conscious choice helps a faster to undertake the writing of a new song.

As fasting is not the only means for enlightenment, there is also beauty in just appreciating the pure sensation of a spoonful of food or the seconds between mouthfuls.

In doing so, you are not just indulging in the taste, but also acknowledging its value: the energy this food provides.

Such mindful bites could set the tone for the next task in your routine, lifting you from the daily grind into the proper headspace for grander thoughts.

And if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, you could contemplate how the food you choose to eat reflects your current state in life, mentally and physically.)

“Babette’s Feast” – Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) But beyond Woolf and Rumi, this article would be incomplete without paying homage to the life-affirming short story “Babette’s Feast,” which has since formed its own “cuisine” of food-centric literature. (And what a perfect way to wrap up our literary meal so you too can wax poetic, like Mary after her Oxbridge luncheon.)

In this work, Dinesen explores the role of the great artist and portrays culinary art as a means for reaching transcendence. Unlike the previous selections, “Babette’s Feast” devotes itself fully to the relationship between great food and the human spirit, suggesting that there is no distinction between fulfilling a physical and spiritual appetite.

The story begins in a remote coastal Danish village, where elderly sisters Martine and Philippa have renounced worldly goods for their strict Lutheran faith. When they take in French refugee and former elite chef Babette, their lives slowly improve, starting with their taste buds.

Babette takes over their household economy and honors their ascetic lifestyle, and her small, but significant, changes she makes to their “plain fare” become irreplaceable. The sisters live sparingly so they can give soup-pails to the poor, and ask Babette to save money by only cooking bland, simple food like split cod and

“Babette’s Feast” Menu (Note: The critically-acclaimed film of the same name offers an excellent interpretation of the short story along with a visual depiction of the menu. Several restaurants have also recreated it.)

“Potage à la Tortue” (turtle soup) served with Amontillado sherry “Blinis Demidoff ” (buckwheat pancakes with caviar and sour cream) served with Veuve Cliquot Champagne “Cailles en Sarcophage” (quail in puff pastry shell with foie gras and truffle sauce) served with Clos de Vougeot Pinot Noir Endive salad

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“Savarin au Rhum avec des Figues et Fruit Glacée” (rum sponge cake with figs and candied cherries) served with Champagne Assorted cheeses and fruits served with Sauternes Coffee with vieux marc Grande Champagne cognac

ale-and-bread-soup. Babette quietly acquiesces, but spends her time haggling in the fish and vegetable markets, “beat[ing] down the prices of Berlevaag’s flintiest tradesmen” in her quest for the freshest of ingredients as a true chef.

Even among people disdainful of earthly pleasures, Babette inserts beauty into the everyday through her continual dedication to cooking. Though she no longer creates luxurious menus, her dishes improve the lives of even the lowest of the village. Her charity soup-pails “acquir[e] a new, mysterious power to stimulate and strengthen their poor and sick” and she gains local renown and acceptance.

Once good taste is learned, it can never be forgotten.

After fourteen years of humble service, Babette wins the lottery and requests to use her winnings for cooking a lavish meal in honor of their sect’s founder. Though torn between supporting Babette and following their strict faith, the sisters agree, and Babette serves a scrumptious seven-course meal (menu below) to the congregation.

Babette’s feast demonstrates how earthly pleasure can become intertwined with the spirit’s transcendence. As shown by the favorable response from Babette’s improved aleand-bread soup, eating is such a fundamental need that people can appreciate excellent food without pinpointing the exact reasons (fresh ingredients and additional herbs).

The congregation’s sudden rise from austere living to a seven-course French meal allows them to profoundly savor the experience, which by the last course elevates their spirits into religious ecstasy. The congregation does not realize that they drink Veuve Cliquot 1860 (they reckon the drink a sort of lemonade),

but it still “seemed to lift them off the ground, into a higher and purer sphere.” Food speaks so directly to the senses that they gradually lose their reservations and can enjoy the symphony of flavors. “It was, [the congregation] realized, when man has not only altogether forgotten but has firmly renounced all ideas of food and drink that he eats and drinks in the right spirit.”

Since the villagers are inexperienced in fine dining, Dinesen skillfully conveys taste to the reader through descriptions of their enjoyment and the unexpected visit of General Loewenhielm, the only guest who can voice the specifics of each dish. The General, a visiting nephew of one of the congregation members, had previously eaten at Babette’s former restaurant and was no stranger to fine Parisian dining. Only the General can point out the “Blinis Demidoff,” the Veuve Cliquot 1860, and even Babette’s signature dish, the “Cailles en Sarcophage.”

By the last course, the General rises to make a toast to God’s grace while intoxicated with “the noblest wine of the world,” symbolizing Babette’s brilliance in fully uniting man’s physical and spiritual nature through food. He praises the meal as a “love affair … in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety.”

In doing so, the General uses his greater worldliness to finally persuade the congregation that material pleasures — art — can also offer spiritual enlightenment. For the congregation, their sensory pleasure has shown them “infinite grace” so they could see “the universe as it really is.” Old hurts and petty squabbling fade away; the fantastic meal has alchemized into lofty thoughts and actions.

Babette’s culinary art has worked a near-

miracle, but she is also an artist of the mundane, similar to how food is both a culinary art and a fundamental need. After all the guests have returned home, Babette reveals she spent all 10,000 francs on the meal, her last grand demonstration of her talents. Though the sisters are dismayed at Babette’s sacrifice, she explains “a great artist, Mesdames, is never poor.” With these words, we harken back to Babette’s subtle changes in the improved aleand-bread soup with its recuperative powers, how she has fluidly adjusted her artistic output to match her new audience of the poor and sickly.

Babette has no more funds to create meals like those from her former restaurant, but she will continue practicing her art for the village.

The splendor of her talents still shine through humble fare, even if the consumers will only experience flickers of the greatness she had wrought in her final feast. Sensing Babette’s bittersweet acceptance of her fate, Philippa offers hope by linking Babette’s earthly gift with spiritual rewards, exclaiming, “this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be … Oh, how you will enchant the angels!”

I hope these three literary bites – “A Room of One’s Own,” “Fasting,” and “Babette’s Feast” – have given you much food for thought. While each selection has its own distinct flavor, as a trio they beautifully weave a physical need with a literary theme, and in doing so shape our understanding of food, human nature, and the everyday life moments between each bite.

Mints, anyone?

Contact Shana Hadi at shanaeh@stanford.edu.

Issue 2 | 9

RIGHT side, STRONG side

Audriana Fitzmorris’ volleyball journey

Courtesy of Stanford Athletics

By Bobby Pragada

L

et me set the stage for you. You’re in the stands of the 2016 NCAA women’s volleyball tournament, the quarterfinal match between the No. 3-seeded Wisconsin Badgers and the No. 6-seeded Stanford Cardinal.

“The game against Wisconsin in the quarterfinals — that’s a game that will always 10 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

stick out to me.”

The game is in Madison, Wisconsin, and the stands are full of Badger fans rabid for their team, which only lost four games all season, to advance to the Final Four in Columbus, Ohio.

What’s more, Wisconsin is up 2-0, dominating the first two sets.

“We were in an environment that was completely against us. We had 10 total Stanford fans, and everyone else was like, ‘Wisconsin!’”

What’s more, the Stanford volleyball team is starting four true freshman in its rotation — its starting libero, outside, setter and one of its middle blockers are all brand new to college volleyball. The road to the Final Four is just a matter of waiting for the inevitable.

“How we rallied back will always kind of stick in my mind.”

One week after one of the most intense games of her life, then-freshman middle blocker Audriana Fitzmorris, ’20, is cutting down the net in Columbus, celebrating with her team by her side.

The Stanford women’s volleyball recruiting class of 2016 may go down as one of the greatest collective groups in the history of the sport.

In just one year, the Cardinal recruited just about an entire court full of All-Americans.

They collected Morgan Hentz ’20, a libero out of Lakeside Park, Kentucky, the 2017 Pac-12 Libero of the Year and possibly the best defensive specialist in college volleyball. They added Jenna Gray ’20, a setter from Kansas City, the 2017 Pac-12 Setter of the Year and one of only a few freshman setters to ever lead a team to a national championship. And, the Cardinal recruited the crown jewel of the 2016 class, Kathryn Plummer ’20, a 6’6” outside hitter from Aliso Viejo, California, whose list of accolades seems almost too lengthy. Plummer was the 2016 Pac-12 Freshman of the Year, the 2017 ESPNw Player of the Year and the 2017 AVCA player of the year. On top of that, she is a two-time first team All-American — not to mention the most terrifying outside hitter in college volleyball.

Big players, big talents, big personalities. But if you look past these larger-than-life volleyball legends in the making, you’ll find the fourth

member of this miraculous group of classmates.

The gentle giant Audriana Fitzmorris is, in the truest sense of the phrase, a gentle giant. At 6’6” she is the tallest member of the tallest volleyball squad in the country, standing maybe a hair and a half over Kathryn Plummer. When I asked her who was actually taller, she laughed and proclaimed the question “controversial” before finally relenting and claiming she had the edge.

And that’s Fitzmorris, captured in a single moment. A more reserved, quiet personality than some of her eccentric teammates — teammates who do nothing but admire and appreciate her caring, inquisitive, selfless nature.

In the words of the team’s head coach, Kevin Hambly, “There’s nothing about her that is not positive. She is always striving to be the best athlete, the best human being, the best student.

She’s really curious about life — she is exploring this world, consuming as much of this world as she can. And she does it in this very quiet, softspoken kind of way, but she is attacking life in every possible way, and I love it.”

And yet, her soft, laughter-filled voice and her omnipresent smile aren’t exactly representative of her presence on the court. Calling her “gentle” betrays the enormous shadow she casts over opposing volleyball players as she stuffs their attacks into the ground.

The best feeling in volleyball, according to her? “Great stuff block. That feeling of clap boom. Big block over big kill.”

Make no mistake, Fitzmorris is one of the most fearsome competitors and talented volleyball players on this team of absurd athletes. Aside from Kathryn Plummer, she’s the only member of the recruiting class to be named an All-American in both of her years on the team.

Fitzmorris has been playing volleyball since she was in middle school, and in this sport, when you’re young and you’re tall, you get placed squarely in the middle of the court, at the middle blocker position. Coming into high school, she measured officially at 6’3”.

Fitzmorris’ parents are the 6’7” Michael

Fitzmorris and 6’2” Maria Luisa Fitzmorris.

They both played professional basketball in Peru. Her older sister is 6’5” Alex Fitzmorris, who played volleyball at Morehead State, Boston College and Arkansas, and was a major inspiration for Audriana Fitzmorris to pick up the sport. And her younger brother is 7’0” Keenan Fitzmorris ’22, a current freshman at Stanford who plays center for the basketball team. Their five heights are the approximate measurements of a starting lineup in the NBA. She attended high school at St. James Academy in Kansas City. Sound familiar? That’s right, she actually went to the same high school as setter Jenna Gray. The two have been playing volleyball together now for seven full years.

Jenna thinks it’s given the duo a special connection on the court. “I definitely think that playing alongside each other for such a long time has given us an intuitive connection. We have gotten a really good understanding of how to read and communicate with each other.”

And yet, they independently decided to attend Stanford, after an arduous recruiting process that began in eighth grade and ended with verbal commitments to the Farm.

2016: The storybook season

Moving onto the team

They finished the regular season 27-7.

They still placed second in the Pac-12 behind Washington but entered the tournament as the sixth overall seed.

In one of the most intensely dramatic moments of the movie, the team was down 0-2 to Wisconsin, as I alluded to earlier. Rallying back in a hostile crowd, they played near perfect volleyball as they booked their ticket to the Final Four. Fitzmorris knocked down 10 kills on .333 hitting with seven digs. More importantly, she and Ajanaku led the Cardinal defensive front, with Fitzmorris accounting for a massive three solo blocks and assisting on three more.

Fitzmorris arrived on campus with one goal in mind: to get on the court and start playing as soon as possible. Middle blockers usually come in pairs within a volleyball rotation, so she was fighting for one of two spots. On top of that, one of the best middle blockers to ever come through Stanford was returning as a redshirt senior after missing the previous season with a knee injury: four-time All-American and fifthyear senior Inky Ajanaku, ‘17.

“Inky Ajanaku was one that … I would always watch [as a middle blocker,]” Fitzmorris told me. “Being able to play on the same side of the court as her is incredible — you don’t want to play on the opposite side of her, but playing on the same side of the court as her ... I learned so much my freshman year from blocking against her, from her leadership. It was cool to see her progression through the season just coming back from the injury and how much better she got, how much more comfortable she got.”

Even to snatch the second spot, Fitzmorris had to overcome issues of depth. With the type of mindset that she has towards the game, this was a blessing in disguise.

“I got there and was like ‘Okay, let’s work,’” Fitzmorris said. “I definitely felt like I had to earn every minute that I got on the court.

I’ve always felt that way — high school, club, whatever. I’ve always wanted it to be that way.”

It worked. She started in the first game of the season.

The 2016 Stanford volleyball season was something straight out of a movie. Four upstart, inexperienced, talented freshmen, a legendary veteran returning from a crippling injury and the greatest women’s volleyball coach of all time, John Dunning, back for one final year before retirement.

“John Dunning is a name I think everyone in the entire volleyball world knows,” Fitzmorris said with a smile on her face.

“I definitely felt like I had to earn every minute that I got on the court. I’ve always felt that way.”

They were the team of destiny at that point, upsetting No. 2 Minnesota 3-1 in the semifinals before moving on to the championship against the No. 4 Texas Longhorns. In an all-time classic game, Stanford claimed the national championship 3-1, with Fitzmorris putting up 10 kills, four digs and three blocks on a .375 hitting percentage.

Fitzmorris was on the court for the final point, a Plummer spike into the Texas block, which spiraled out of bounds in Longhorn territory. The tension amongst the team broke into excitement, tears and a massive hug in the center of the court.

“I would just say it was surreal,” Fitz said about the team’s upset victory. “It was almost like I was removed from the situation for a little moment, being able to see all of it in sort of like the third person. We had worked really hard that season. It was very bumpy, up and down — didn’t know what to expect most of the time. That moment with my teammates was amazing.”

Stanford claimed its seventh women’s volleyball title that year, tying Penn State for the most all-time championships in the sport. The Cardinal sent John Dunning into retirement and Ajanaku into the pros with one final win under their belts.

2017: Utter dominance The 2017 team wasn’t out of a movie. It was an absolute killing machine. Enter former Illinois coach Kevin Hambly.

Strangely enough, Hambly and Fitzmorris already had a personal relationship as he had been recruiting her to play for Illinois back in high school. “I’ve known their whole family long, long before I was here,” the head coach told me.

Whatever amount of adjustment was

Fitzmorris (left) and Inky Ajanaku (right) line up together on the court, able to play and learn alongside each other.

BOB DREBIN/isiphotos.com Issue 2 | 11

required, it happened quickly. After losing two times to Penn State within the first two weeks of the season, the Cardinal went on an absolute tear. They won 16 straight games in the middle of the season and only lost once more, to Washington on the road. Final Record: 30-3, 19-1 in the Pac-12.

Fitzmorris did not slow down her learning or her growth.

“I knew more of what to expect. Going through the whole freshman season, everything is kind of new — you’re just like, ‘Oh, we do this now? This is how this works?’” she said. “But sophomore season, you know what to expect so you’re more comfortable in the logistics of things. I was more able to focus on the technique and put myself in situations where I was more useful and more efficient.”

Stanford rolled its way to its first Pac-12 title since 2014 and entered the tournament as the third overall seed. In a bracket that led them through a quarterfinals showdown with the Texas Longhorns, the Cardinal put on an absolute clinic, only dropping one set through four games.

Principle in these wins was Fitzmorris, whose ability to attack off of a slide was absolutely crushing opposing defenses, letting her hit incredibly efficiently. She averaged a hitting percentage of over .400 in the bracket stage, including a 10-0-12 night for a .833 performance against CSU Bakersfield.

The team advanced to the Final Four, which was held in Kansas City. Gray and Fitzmorris found the opportunity to compete in their hometown, with high school friends, family,

coaches and countless others cheering them on.

They faced off against the No. 2 Florida Gators in the semi-finals. And suddenly, after a season of dominance, the team looked mortal.

“I’m a firm believer that anyone can beat anyone else on any given day, but the most disappointing thing was coming from that game knowing that we hadn’t played our best, hadn’t gotten to the level that we knew we could,” Fitzmorris said.

The Cardinal fell behind to an early 0-2, a position they’d been in before. But despite rallying back, tying the score and forcing a 15-point fifth set, they couldn’t close out the job.

“Since we didn’t get to that point as a team, it was disappointing to walk away from and know we could have done better.”

Despite looking so dominant in the bracket, Fitzmorris nearly vanished during the semifinal game. Her slide hit was not landing, and she was incredibly ineffective, posting one of the worst performances of her college career. She hit 27 balls, eight for kills and six for errors: a .074 hitting percentage. She only accounted for four blocks through five sets, no digs and one service error.

“I’m not one to make excuses, but I’ve been dealing with a back injury for the last season now, which sucks, but it is something I have to battle day in and day out,” Audriana said.

“There’s a lot of variability with it... I think towards the end of the season my body kind of took a hit but still tried to work through it for the last few games. [In] the semifinal, unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go past my injury

JOHN P. LOZANO/isiphotos.com Fitzmorris throws down a kill from the opposite position during Stanford’s 3-0 sweep of USC in 2018.

12 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

as I’m usually able to do.”

The Cardinal entered the offseason with unfinished business.

New year, new position And suddenly, there was a massive change.

Coach Hambly made the decision to remove Fitzmorris from the middle blocker position. “[She] and I had kind of talked about it,” Hambly said. “It wasn’t this big eventful thing — I think she always kind of wanted to try out the different positions. She’s very curious and studious and loves learning — that’s one of the main things that motivates her.”

Still, taking your two-time, All-American middle blocker and uprooting her from the spot she’s been in since middle school seems like a big step. Hambly doesn’t see it that way.

“I always thought she’d be better as a pin, either a left or a right, just from her physiological makeup,” he said. “She’s not a super twitchy kid, but she’s long and smooth and it makes her a better outside or right side.”

Hambly told me that when the recruiting process first began all those years ago in high school, he initially saw her as a pin player — that is, playing on the left or right side of the net. In fact, the initial plan was for her to play the entirety of the 2017 season as an outside hitter.

“I was kind of hoping we could get one of the two middles to develop, and it just didn’t take. It made more sense to have her in the middle,” Kevin said. “I was disappointed — she did a great job [and] put up great numbers, but the minute we got out of the season I knew we wanted to put her on a pin.”

With Plummer and McClure holding down the outside hitter position coming into 2018, it made more sense to put Fitzmorris on the right side, at the opposite position. This was especially true given the graduation of opposite Merete Lutz, ’18.

“Merete had an incredible impact on the team. She was an incredible person and I loved her — on the court she contributed so much and was a termination player in times that we needed her,” Audriana said, paying respects to her former teammate.

But this swap at the position wasn’t a downgrade from the experienced veteran at all in Hambly’s eyes. If anything, it was an upgrade.

“Merete was 6’8”, and that doesn’t seem like that big of a difference — the 6’6” to 6’8”,” he explained. “Merete was this big powerful thing that could only go in straight lines — she wasn’t nimble. Audriana moves on the floor a lot better; she can play defense better; she can pass. Audriana is a better all-around volleyball player than Merete.”

The opposite is an incredibly interesting position in the sport of volleyball. Because of their primary attacking position on the right side the court, they’re the player most often responsible for blocking the other team’s best outside hitter. They’ve also got to be a reliable, terminating option, as they attack a weaker block than the outsides tend to.

Kathryn Plummer maintains that having Fitzmorris on the right opens up the entire offense. “She gives so many people one-on-one opportunities because other teams are keying on her a lot in the three hitter rotations,” Plummer said. “Having Audriana on the right side spreads out our offense and allows us to have a lot more options. She’s so versatile at every position in the front row and can hit every set, so our offense becomes a lot more fun.”

Fitzmorris’ shot has a great deal of finesse and control to it, something she displayed in spades with slide hits from the middle position. She’s also one of the team’s best blockers and brings that experience with her from the middle.

As she put it: “I’m pretty analytical — I like seeing little technique stuff, so it’s beneficial to have that middle experience, to know as a middle what I was expecting from the right side and, as a right side now, [to] know what I’m expecting from the middles.”

However, the opposite is tasked with playing in the back row of the rotation as well, involved in receiving and passing, something middle blockers tend not to do. Fitzmorris’ diverse physical skillset should allow her to bring a massive improvement to this aspect of the Cardinal offense.

The decision to move Fitzmorris may also have had something to do with the arrival of freshman middle blocker Holly Campbell ’22, who has stepped up in a huge way for the Cardinal so far this season. She’s performed admirably in the role that Fitzmorris played until this season, acting almost as a plug and play, letting the Cardinal continue their dominance from last season.

There’s also a hope from the team that playing the opposite position will prevent any further complications with Fitzmorris’ back injury.

“The middle [involves] a lot of jumping, slides that are putting asymmetrical distribution on your body, so that also probably contributed to my back. It’s a healthier position [to be] on the right side,” Fitzmorris said.

Fitzmorris has started every game this year at the opposite position and has been improving steadily in every game. So far this season she’s averaging 3.04 kills per set, way up from her previous marks of 2.41 and 2.31. She’s also hitting .361 on the season.

The most important part of her transition to the right side to consider, however, is her personal enjoyment. She’s been playing in the middle for so long, that when I asked her if she enjoyed playing the position, she gave a sigh and a laugh, and she didn’t know immediately

“I’m a firm believer that anyone can beat anyone else on any given day...” what to say.

“I think I’m gonna get there. I think I still love playing, especially with my teammates,” Fitzmorris said. “I think I’ll get to the point where I love the position, but there’s a lot of pressure I’m putting on myself and a lot of learning to do. When I hit a point of comfort and adaptation, I think I will like the position.”

The Fitzmorris way Fitzmorris has all the support in the world from the team, from her coaches, from her family, friends, peers and every single Stanford volleyball fan in the world, including me.

Fitzmorris is universally beloved. She’s inquisitive, supportive, selfless, joyful, curious, generous, kind,

hard-working, and that’s just a list of adjectives taken directly from the few people I asked about her.

She’s a human biology major, and her personality shows itself even in her studies and career path. “I’ve always been interested in health and medicine from a young age,” she said. “Through that, I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do. I always wanted to help people, and I love person-to-person interactions. I’ve always seen medicine as a direct route to being able to help another person.”

But before that, she’d really love to keep playing volleyball as long as possible.

“I love the sport. As long as I’m healthy, I’d love to continue playing and seeing where it can take me,” she said. “I love traveling, [and] I love experiencing different cultures, and volleyball has been able to provide me with a lot of awesome opportunities to do that.”

If you ask any of her teammates or coaches, every single one of them would tell you that Fitzmorris will play professionally one day. Any volleyball organization in the world would be incredibly lucky to have a player as motivated and dedicated to learning the game and improving as Audriana Fitzmorris.

Plus, who knows what her ceiling actually is? Maybe by this time next year Coach Hambly will have her playing libero.

Contact Bobby Pragada @stanford.edu.

at

bpragada

JOHN P. LOZANON/isiphotos.com Fitzmorris’ abilities make her a lethal weapon out of the back row, something best unlocked in the outside position.

Issue 2 | 13

From mariachi musician to tour guide: My journey in finding a community at Stanford

by Avery Rogers

A

s a child and adolescent,

I was severely underexposed to the idea of community. Thanks to my dad’s shifting job opportunities, I lived in 11 different houses in five different regions of the country by my 18th birthday. East Coast, West Coast, Rocky Mountains — I’ve been all over, never for more than five years at a time. We never lived in my parents’ home states, or in any proximity to my grandparents or other relatives. Consequently, geography and locality never provided a sense of community for me. In only one house did I know the names of my next-door neighbors (and only the people who lived to our right; I never even laid eyes on the couple who supposedly lived in the house to our left).

School wasn’t much better for building community. Not only did I switch schools often as a result of moving, but I was never good at integrating myself into social groups. I made close friendships with certain individuals here and there, but I only felt like part of a group for a short stint in seventh grade (before I moved out-of-state midway through the year) and during freshman year of high school. Even these groups weren’t really “community” in any meaningful sense of the word because they contained only four or five girls at a time. As for my grade more broadly, I felt no particular connection. I was advanced in many subjects and took classes with the older students, so I missed most of the classroom bonding that happened within my grade. Unfortunately, the older students never took me in as one of their own, either. I was in perpetual limbo, stuck between — and thus separate from — the

communities I was supposed to join.

This lack of belonging (augmented by a breakdown in my few close relationships) led me to leave my high school altogether and do my senior year online, from the comfort — and isolation — of my own home. There were days when I didn’t leave the house, and most of my non-familial interactions were with cashiers and grocery clerks who never knew my first name. I didn’t spend time with another teenager for 10 months straight.

Arriving at Stanford last year was my first real opportunity to find community in my life. As such, I had a lot of questions and concerns about how I might go from isolation to belonging, about what kind of community would make me feel at home. Or was “feeling at home” even the right criteria for a true community? What was community really about — solidarity, intellectual stimulation, mutual talents, identity, shared passion, a common cause? What was the difference between a community in name and a community in spirit?

During fall quarter of freshman year, I joined a few extracurriculars on campus. Most conducive to building community among them was the Stanford Mariachi Band. I had no prior experience playing mariachi music (or, for that matter, listening to mariachi music — I genuinely thought it included maracas), but I did play guitar, and they needed more players for the rhythm section. Thus, I became one of the freshman recruits, another of whom had played mariachi in Carnegie Hall.

Mariachi was a wonderful experience. I loved

the opportunity to get lost in the simultaneous technical difficulty and beauty of the music. I met great people, one of whom is still a close friend today. I never missed a practice, and I delighted in the opportunity to practice my Spanish.

But it never felt to me like my community.

Perhaps this was partially a linguistic problem,

JULES WYMAN/The Stanford Daily

since I often felt left behind when the Latin American students made jokes in Spanish that I couldn’t understand. But I was not the only non-fluent speaker in the group, so it was not entirely a matter of language. I believe my greatest challenge in finding community had to do with the structure of the instrumental groups. Once a week the rhythm section (guitar, guitarrón and vihuela) practiced together

What was the difference between a community in name and a community in spirit?

14 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

“...community isn’t necessarily about having something in common with the people around you. It is, rather, about having in common the desire to be a community.”

separate from the violins. When we did practice together twice a week, the violinists all stood on one side of the room, and the rhythm section stood opposite them. This physical divide, for an introvert like myself, acted as a genuine barrier to meeting and befriending people from the violin section. It’s hard to feel a sense of community when you’ve never spoken a word to some of its members.

For schedule reasons I permanently left mariachi in the winter. My next extracurricular community came in the spring, when I was hired as a tour guide. Being a Stanford tour guide is, as any tour guide will attest, a strange hybrid of campus job and social group. Guides get to know each other through training, office shifts, monthly meetings and informal socializing (regular nacho lunches at the GSB, for example). The tour guide group prides itself on being a real community, and in many respects, they succeed. Every guide I’ve met even briefly waves and says hello to me around campus — and for an 80-person group, that’s a genuine feat. I feel comfortable making small talk at the Visitor Center, something I usually go great lengths to avoid.

Is the tour guide group my community? In some ways I’d say yes, but again, the group is large enough that I don’t know everyone’s name, let alone their personal histories. I am optimistic that time will deepen my nascent sense of community at the visitor center, but I’ll have to wait and see.

Of course, I have thus far omitted the obvious freshman community: my freshman dorm, West Lag. As we all know, freshman dorms are a unique sort of community. You share your Stanford acceptance in common, but beyond that, you’re just a random group of 18-or-so year-olds from across the world, without a single other thread connecting you.

You join people from many countries, religions, interests, talents and personality types, some of whom would never come into contact otherwise. There is no self-selection and thus nothing real to bond you to each other — the whole “community” is completely artificial and exists only because of proximity and

convenience.

If community rested on shared identity, values or interests, then West Lag should not have been a community — but it was. Thanks to the aggressive bonding agenda of freshman resident assistants, I knew everyone’s names and at least a few things about each freshman resident by the end of Week 2. After a month I called a few of the fellow residents my best friends. A year later, I’m still living with one of my same roommates, and those best friends are my best friends to this day.

Unlike any other group or class, West Lag

JULES WYMAN/The Stanford Daily

pulled me out of my shell and reminded me what it felt like to have friends and belong to something bigger than my own family. I wasn’t part of the dominant social group in the dorm, and I didn’t go to many dorm events or parties; I was (and still am) more of a “Friday night in my dorm room” kind of person. But in West Lag, I discovered that a community is not necessarily a space for socialization; it is more importantly, in my opinion, a space for safety of all kinds. West Lag gave me a home, physically

and emotionally, to return to each evening, and inside of West Lag I felt comfortable being myself (including the self with wet hair and wearing pajamas). Everyone said hello to me as I walked down the hall or passed them on the way to class, and everyone would have been there to comfort and console me if they were, by chance, put to the task. I believe I speak for everyone when I say that we cared for and respected each other, no matter how attached we were to the social pulse of the dorm.

West Lag taught me that community isn’t necessarily about having something in common with the people around you. It is, rather, about having in common the desire to be a community. You have to put in the effort to learn people’s names, to promise each other safety and security and to spend time with one another. You have to let your guard down, whether by wearing ugly pajamas or sharing secrets, and put down real emotional roots in a group. You must organize around some principle value, even if that value is simply having a functional college dorm.

Learning this was beautiful for several reasons. It affirmed for me the reality of a common humanity that transcends borders, beliefs and abilities. It also showed me that I do not have to limit myself to people or groups who resemble me in order to find a sense of belonging. Finally, it gave me hope for the future, that I will be able to find communities here at Stanford and beyond when I need them, as long as I make the effort to take part.

Community is not complicated; if people want community, community will arise. All you need is intention, patience and kindness — which, though effortful, are universal capabilities.

So remember that when you’re searching for community of your own, the most important ingredient is your own commitment. Be a community member, and you’ll make community.

Contact Avery Rogers at averyr@stanford.edu.

Issue 2 | 15

Unchaining the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo’s famous study falls under scrutiny

By Hannah Knowles

O

n March 7, 2007, Philip Zimbardo used his last lecture at Stanford to declare that he’d left his most famous experiment behind.

Capping off a discussion of the 1971 findings that made him a public figure, movie character and textbook staple, the renowned psychology professor told the audience he was ready to start probing acts of heroism, rather than acts of abuse.

“I’m never going to study evil again,” he said.

The room was packed – not unusual for a course featuring Zimbardo, whose sixday Stanford Prison Experiment drew great 16 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

attention as a dramatic demonstration of the power of roles and the way ordinary people can turn cruel under the wrong circumstances.

Students who frequented the psychology department in Jordan Hall might have noticed a plaque marking the site of the study: Nearly 40 years prior, the building’s basement hosted a mock jail of college students in which – as Zimbardo tells it – student guards went so rogue with power and prisoners became so depressed that the professor had to call off his experiment. A colleague gushed later that week to Stanford News that Zimbardo’s research and teaching contributions were “probably unmatched by anyone – not only at Stanford,

but throughout the world.”

Despite that switch to heroism he announced in his farewell lecture, Zimbardo is as inextricably linked today as ever to his most controversial work, conducted when he was in his 30s and newly tenured at Stanford.

Now, though, Zimbardo battles accusations of questionable methodology and scientific fraud.

A journalist’s revisiting of the prison experiment has cast new doubt on its value: In an article quickly picked up around web, Ben Blum highlights participants’ claims that they were just acting and archival footage that he presents as evidence Zimbardo and his collaborators worked to elicit particular

behavior. A French book by author Thibault Le Texier, published two months before Blum’s article, catalogues even more criticisms. While the summer’s discussion of the Stanford Prison Experiment focused on Blum’s arguments, an English-language summary of Le Texier’s findings – slated to publish in American Psychologist this month – could set off even greater scrutiny of the study as it reaches a U.S. audience.

The ensuing criticism is rocking 85-yearold Zimbardo’s legacy in a way that decades of long-simmering but quiet critiques of the study didn’t, reshaping the experiment’s public image amid growing skepticism of influential psychology studies. Those who questioned the experiment for years are wondering why the reckoning took so long.

Others find value in the study despite its criticisms – and wonder if some of the blaring headlines sparked by Blum’s article, which asserts that, “The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham,” suffer from the same lack of nuance that characterized earlier coverage of the prison experiment.

Caught in the center, even Zimbardo seems torn between describing the experiment as an elaborate show and touting its scientific value.

This comes across when he responds to the account of James Peterson M.S. ’91 Ph.D. ’74, a prisoner in the study who says he was let go early for no apparent reason.

Peterson, then a Ph.D. in engineering, recalls doing “a really lousy job as a guard” – nerdy and socially awkward, he drew weird looks during a count-off of the prisoners’ numbers by whimsically ordering the other students to yell out their ID numbers in “nines complement,” a computer science term.

Peterson has a hunch that his silly performance got him kicked out of the experiment. After his shift finished, he claims that someone on the research team – he doesn’t remember who – called him over to say he didn’t have to return. It turned out he wasn’t needed anymore, Peterson said.

Faced with this story, Zimbardo said he doesn’t remember Peterson but didn’t attempt to contradict Peterson’s account.Instead, he explained that, “it might have been that Peterson just didn’t want to get into the role.

That is, you know, just didn’t want to force the prisoners to do push-ups and jumping jacks and all the other things.”

“The only reason we would let a guard go,” he said, “is if he was not playing his role.”

Zimbardo doesn’t seem to see an issue with removing someone from the experiment for failing to display the role-conforming behavior the researchers were observing for.

“The point is, it’s a drama,” he says. “You have

to play the role in order for the whole thing to work.”

‘Nobody read it’ Siamak Movahedi, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who specializes in social psychology, was one of the Stanford Prison Experiment’s earliest doubters.

In 1975, just a few years after the study made headlines, Movahedi and his colleague Ali Banuazizi published the first major methodological critique of the experiment in

realize that Zimbardo’s project was flawed in an experimental sense.

And yet, Movahedi’s issue is with Zimbardo’s approach, not his message about the power of the situation. Several decades ago, a San Francisco attorney called Movahedi looking for criticism of the prison experiment’s findings; Zimbardo was set to testify in a case about prison abuse, and the lawyer wanted Movahedi to speak against him. Movahedi promptly called Zimbardo and offered to write him a note of qualified support.

“I sent him a letter saying we simply have some disagreements with you on

“He did a disservice to his own reputation and, more importantly, to the field of social psychology...”

– Ali Banuazizi, social psychologist

American Psychologist.

The two scholars argued that the Stanford Prison Experiment did not show students genuinely consumed by their roles as prisoner and guard. Rather, they said, it showed participants engaging in a sort of theater – acting out stereotypical guard and prisoner behavior in response to what psychologists call “demand characteristics,” or cues on the goals of an experiment that participants pick up on.

Movahedi and Banuazizi are skeptical of the idea that a bunch of white college students roleplaying for a week could reproduce the psychological workings of a real prison.

Their paper went largely unnoticed until just recently, when Movahedi started to notice surprising readership statistics from sites like academia.com – where, in August, the paper was downloaded at least 400 times.

“For 40 years, nobody read it,” Movahedi said.

The sudden interest raises a question for many of Zimbardo’s critics in the psychology community: What took so long? You don’t have to read Ben Blum’s article, they say, to

methodological issues; however, we completely share your conclusion and hypotheses that it’s the structure which leads to some of this oppressive behavior,” Movahedi recalled.

Movahedi understands why the prison study has stuck around. For one thing, it’s a hit with students. It’s a good teaching tool that gets their attention and pushes them to consider roles and social structure. Movahedi presents it in his classes every October, albeit with a discussion of its shortcomings.

He calls the prison study an “evocative object,” something useful for thinking but not for real data on a research question.

“It’s kind of a little play-acting that makes a point,” he said.

Although Zimbardo calls his study a “drama,” he views it as more than mere theater.

He presents it as research from one of the top psychology departments in the country, as evidence for legal cases and debates over U.S. policy. He’s spoken before Congress. He’s called for prison reform. He testified for the defense in the Abu Ghraib guard trials, saying that situational forces just like those in the Stanford Prison Experiment led a good guy to abuse Issue 2 | 17

Courtesy of Stanford Libraries

detainees Movahedi’s coauthor Banuazizi said he’s disappointed that Zimbardo chose to ignore the criticisms and continue pushing a “glorified” narrative of the experiment.

“In doing so, I believe, he did a disservice to his own reputation and, more importantly, to the field of social psychology,” Banuazizi said.

“In the beginning it was overstated, and Zimbardo says, given that he told a story of a probably even from me,” he said when asked genuine mental crisis when interviewed for a about the surety of that quote. “I was too close documentary back in the 1990s: “The Stanford Prison Experiment was a very benign situation, to it.”

Critics say that Zimbardo is still in denial but it still caused guards to become sadistic about the nature of his experiment, and Blum’s [and] prisoners to become hysterical,” he said piece published on Medium this June presents at the time.

Archival materials paint a more complex a host of issues to answer for. One prisoner says that his much-publicized mental breakdown picture of the prisoner’s exit. In raw video that was actually a ploy to leave the experiment early was edited out of the documentary, the prisoner Zimbardo responds and prepare for the GRE (he joined the study also states that he acted up in order to leave the thinking he’d be able to spend the day reading). experiment. Back in 1971, he told researchers Zimbardo has long acknowledged problems Others recall trying to quit the experiment, that he “made up several schemes whereby [he] with his study, although he continues to defend only to hear from Zimbardo that they couldn’t could get out. The easiest one ... was just to act vociferously against many of the issues raised leave – a story supported by a recording, despite mad, or upset, so I chose that one.” by people like Banuazizi, Movahedi, Le Texier Even the prisoner said he was unsure how Zimbardo’s denials. As for Zimbardo and his and Blum. “It wasn’t a formal experiment,” he fellow researchers’ claims that guards slipped exactly to view his exit from the study. Act told Stanford Magazine in 2011. “My colleagues organically into their roles, Blum points to and real emotion were muddled for him, he probably never thought much of it.” He says he audio of a researcher instructing a guard to explained. should never have played the prison warden in “The big thing, I couldn’t decide whether the treat prisoners more sternly. “I was given the his own experiment and wrote early on about responsibility of trying to elicit ‘tough guard’ prison experience had really freaked me out, or the way that he became overly invested in the whether I induced that freaked out thing,” he behavior,” the researcher writes in his notes.

Courtesy of Wikimedia drama as it unfolded. But he hasn’t budged on Commons Zimbardo’s nearly 7,000-word response to says in an tape labeled “Final Reactions to the the experiment’s core validity. his critics, posted on his website devoted to Experiment.” “Even while I was being upset, I The conclusions he describes from his the Stanford Prison Experiment, dismisses the was manipulating and I was being upset.” experiment today are more qualified than what various charges against his study. He points out Zimbardo’s public response does not he expressed in earlier interviews. Faced with that he’s the one who put all his experimental explicitly address all of French author Le accusations of overhype, Zimbardo focuses materials in public archives –– providing his Texier’s specific criticisms. Neither does much in on the participants who took their parts to of the prison experiment’s recent discussion in critics with their ammunition. extremes: He points to late-night video that “The key is, as I say in my response, nothing the media; U.S. coverage of Le Texier’s work has captures guards going far beyond tough talk, is hidden,” he said. been minimal. directing prisoners to pretend to be camels and Researchers who guided guards were “It looks like the truth is not interesting simulate sex. He emphasizes now that students just trying to make sure reluctant students if it’s not written in English,” Le Texier wrote varied in their behavior and that the prison email to The Daily, adding that he sent participated in basic tasks, ZimbardoRYAN says.COHEN/The A in an Stanford Daily experiment showed what could happen to study by two British researchers – often cited Zimbardo an earlier version of his paper in someone under extreme circumstances, rather as a failed attempt to replicate the Stanford April. He contends that Zimbardo focused than what will happen to anyone.

Prison Experiment – differed from the prison on some of Blum’s points because they’re Back in 1971, Zimbardo told The New York study in key ways. Participants were filmed not always anchored in documents from the Times a more sweeping story. for broadcast on a BBC TV show, something archives. Testimony from participants nearly “It is clear that almost anyone put in a certain Zimbardo argues would surely warp results. 50 years later is not nearly as convincing as kind of situation can be made to behave toward And the prisoner who now claims he faked recordings and contemporaneous notes, Le other human beings in a demeaning and brutal his breakdown? His account can’t trusted, Texier said. fashion,” he said.

18 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

The archives, for example, clarify that guards knew what outcomes the experimenters were hoping for, Le Texier writes in his paper. On orientation day, Zimbardo told his recruits that his grant was meant “to study the conditions which lead to mob behavior, violence, loss of identity, feeling of anonymity.”

Le Texier also notes that some guards spoke or wrote to researchers of seeing themselves as experimental aids rather than subjects – people helping the scientists study prisoners’ reactions.

Zimbardo declined in an email to respond specifically to Le Texier’s points, referring The Daily to his lengthy public statement.

Another one of Zimbardo’s rebuttals to his detractors involves an opinion piece published in The Stanford Daily in April of 2005. In the oped, Carlo Prescott – an ex-convict who served as consultant on the prison experiment – slammed Zimbardo and Maverick Entertainment, the production company behind the final iteration of the Stanford Prison Experiment movie.

Prescott takes credit for several of the discipline techniques used by guards in Zimbardo’s study, like covering prisoners’ heads with bags.

The problem, according to Zimbardo: Prescott never wrote the piece. Zimbardo instead pins the op-ed on Michael Lazarou, a producer who lost the rights to a movie about the prison experiment and who Zimbardo theorizes wanted to get back at him.

“It’s white boy’s language, it’s not the language of the ghetto,” Zimbardo says to explain why Prescott, who is African-American, couldn’t have written the critical article. Zimbardo’s online response puts the claim less bluntly: “The writer had a very distinctive legalistic style and vocabulary, not at all like Carlo’s,” he writes.

Zimbardo has rounded up other evidence,

but the truth of the matter is unclear. Seeking a retraction of the op-ed this summer, following broader public criticism of the experiment, he offered The Daily corroboration from Brent Emery, the Stanford Prison Experiment movie’s producer. Emery provided emails from 2005 in which he says Prescott denied writing the piece. However, Emery also told The Daily that Lazarou wrote the op-ed for Prescott to sign; meanwhile, in a recorded phone call posted to Zimbardo’s website this summer, Prescott affirms to the professor’s assistant that he was never involved in the article in any way. The Daily does not have access to its oped correspondence from 2005, and opinion editors from the time did not recall details of publishing the piece.

Several months after first raising the issue, in late September, Zimbardo presented The Daily with a typed retraction request that he said Prescott had signed. He told The Daily he drafted the letter. When asked in August about the retraction request that Zimbardo was eagerly pursuing on his behalf, Prescott said he did not want to speak and hung up on the paper’s editor-in-chief.

Contacted while The Daily was still weighing the retraction request, Prescott initially did not respond with comment for this story. Reached by phone on the morning of Oct. 19, after the retraction request was denied, Prescott refused to answer questions and said he did not want to be bothered again.

“I’m tired of being tortured by something that happened in the past,” he said.

“It didn’t pan out for me,” he said at one point, referring to the prison experiment. He repeated the sentiment later: “It didn’t work for me.”

Asked to discuss the retraction request,

Prescott hung up.

Later that morning, Zimbardo sent The Daily’s reporter and editor-in-chief an email with the subject line, “DR ZIMBARDO URGES YOU TO CEASE AND DESIST FROM CALLING CARLO PRESCOTT.” Prescott, he said in capital letters, was not well and did not want to talk with student reporters about the Stanford Prison Experiment, “NOW OR EVER.” “I SHALL BE TAKING THIS CASE TO MY LAWYER SOON,” Zimbardo closed his email.

Lazarou, for his part, denies any involvement with the op-ed and provided The Daily with an email chain from 2006. In the chain, he tells an accusatory Zimbardo that he spoke with Prescott, and that Prescott never denied authorship. In fact, he writes, Prescott recalled sending a similar letter to an LA Times reporter in response to a story on the prison experiment.

(The LA Times writer declined to comment).

For Lazarou, the whole episode is an indicator of how much the summer’s events have frazzled Zimbardo.

“From his perspective, I think it’s selfpreservation,” said Lazarou, who, with growing alarm, looped in his lawyers this fall after seeing Zimbardo’s accusations against him pop up in a Wikipedia article. “Unfortunately, you can’t make shit up about people.”

Over the phone, Lazarou –– like Prescott –– projects frustration. He said he’s baffled by ongoing discussions of the Stanford Prison Experiment, baffled that people are still asking him about movie rights he lost more than a decade ago. He’d already been contacted

by Blum the freelancer, and now he was on the phone with another reporter, denying authorship of a 13-year-old, student newspaper op-ed that Zimbardo said was borne out of

Courtesy of Stanford Libraries

Philip Zimbardo played the role of both head researcher and prison warden in his infamous Stanford Prison Expertiment.

In 1971, Jordan Hall hosted a mock jail of college students in which, Zimbardo says, guards went rogue and prisoners became depressed.

Issue 2 | 19

Courtesy of Stanford Libraries A 2005 op-ed credited to Carlo Prescott, an ex-convict consultant on the Prison Experiment, claims that Prescott was behind certain guard behaviors like covering prisoners’ heads with bags. The authorship of the op-ed is now disputed.

revenge.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Why is this continuing to – why is this still – what’s going on?”

Changing understandings Despite the heavy scrutiny, Zimbardo’s experiment seems unlikely to leave either the classroom or public discourse.

Chris Farina, who teaches AP Psychology at Palo Alto High School, has mixed feelings about the prison experiment, which he presents to students as a classic example of how a person’s situation can influence their behavior.

After reading up thoroughly on both sides of the argument, he doesn’t think he’ll stop teaching the study – or showing his students “Quiet Rage,” a documentary that largely hews to Zimbardo’s side of the story. He’ll just spend more time discussing the experiment’s methodology, probing its weaknesses.

Farina doesn’t quite buy the summer’s headlines declaring the prison experiment a “sham.”

“They seem as overhyped as they’re claiming the Stanford Prison Experiment itself is,” he said. “Does it have some problems with it?

Absolutely. But a total sham? I don’t know.

Some researchers believe it’s time to kick Zimbardo’s prison experiment out of the psychological canon. Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at UC Davis and advocate of so-called “open science” – which emphasizes integrity and replicability in research – marvels that it took the examination of journalists to force a serious reevaluation.

“Psychology wants to be respected as a science,” she said. “And so I think it’s hard to 20 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

criticize the things that have actually penetrated into the public.”

As cofounder of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, Vazire has been at the front lines of what scientists dub the “replication crisis” – a realization among scientific communities, including the psychology community, that many famous findings are not reproducible. With attempts at replication felling more research, the open science agenda isn’t always popular. Vazire said she understands why influential scientists and gatekeepers in her field push back.

She wishes, though, that this pushback took place more frequently in the open.

“Instead what I see happening a lot is people in meeting rooms making decisions, and sometimes I’m in that room with them, and the arguments I hear are not really scientific arguments,” Vazire said. “They’re more about the politics or whose toes are going to get stepped on, and I think those arguments wouldn’t stand up if they were made publicly.”

Popular psychology textbook authors surveyed by The Daily said they are tweaking, rather than cutting, their coverage of the controversial study. The few scientists who keep the study out of their texts said they never included it to begin with. “The study is so obviously methodologically flawed as to be worthless from a scientific perspective,” said one author, Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray.

Several authors felt unable to leave the prison study out, given its cultural cachet. John Mitterer, whose “Introduction to Psychology” textbook already devotes half its discussion of the prison study to criticism, puts the dilemma this way: Should we leave Freud out because his theories have been debunked? What about

Jung? “These are all things that are already part of the popular imagination,” he said.

Mary Hughes Stone, a professor at San Francisco State, also won’t stop teaching the prison experiment any time soon. While she believes the study provides valuable insight into human behavior, she said she asks students to think critically and never presents any finding as definitive.

But nuances are often lost in introductory courses, and a student video project on the prison experiment passed on by Stone displays little awareness of the complexities that all sorts of critics, from Banuazizi to Blum, have catalogued. The student sums things up neatly in voiceover as the screen fades to black: “[Zimbardo’s] experiment proved that any person can turn bad under certain pressures and roles.”

Silence at Stanford Over the summer, as scholars weighed in on Twitter and in the media, one group of psychologists was particularly quiet about the Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo’s colleagues at Stanford. Few have joined the conversation publicly, and the department has no official comment, following guidance from University Communications.

Brian Wandell, a former psychology chair, believes Stanford has “a special responsibility” for ensuring that the experiment it gave its name to is correctly understood. He demurred, though, when asked whether Stanford is doing a good job of this – “no judgments from me,” he says. It’s the same answer he gives when asked whether Zimbardo has been forthright about his study.

Zimbardo’s guards. Ross believes his colleague’s work applies most fruitfully to situations like Abu Ghraib, where guards were able to use -– and abuse – greater discretion. “[The study] captured the extent to which people put in positions of authority without clear rules tend to improvise and look to see what they can get away with, does anyone stop them,” Ross said.

When Blum’s article came out, Ross, said Gordon Bower – another Stanford professor who briefly glimpsed the prison experiment firsthand – wrote to him. ‘Should we do something?’ They wondered. Should the department publish a defense? (Bower says he does not recall this conversation). Eventually, Ross said, they agreed that a coordinated Stanford statement would be inappropriate: “Some of us know the situation well and some don’t; we should be free as individuals to say whatever we want to.” Bower wrote a public testimonial to his friend’s character, but the department stayed silent.

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“I don’t want to judge people,” he responds.

He likens the study to a work of art, something lacking qualities of a true experiment but still instructive. He saw Zimbardo’s response to the criticisms – emailed out to all the Stanford psychology faculty – but he says he’d need to go back and spend more time on it to weigh in.

“We know there’s no control group,” Wandell added later. “It’s an event. It’s a demonstration.

And Phil in his own self-description always said about himself that [was] what he was good at – he was good at demonstrations.”

Wandell is far from Zimbardo’s area of expertise, social psychology. He spends his days thinking about magnetic resonance imaging and how pictures form on the back of the eye. And so, early in the summer when Blum’s article came out, Wandell turned to his colleagues in social psychology. What did those closest to Zimbardo’s work think?

Wandell says he never got much of an answer.

One professor agreed to circle back with him later, when they got a chance to talk in person,

Dai

ly

but the conversation hasn’t happened yet.

Another faculty member was reluctant to dig into the issue.

“He just felt it’s a sad end to Phil’s career,” Wandell said. “So we didn’t go over it.”

Lee Ross, one of only two Stanford professors in Zimbardo’s subfield who agreed to speak with The Daily, has been more vocal on behalf of his longtime colleague. He is one of the few remaining psychology faculty who were present in 1971 when Zimbardo ran his study. Amid all the controversy this summer, he emailed his thoughts out to the entire department, responding to a request from Zimbardo to help him fend off allegations of fraud.

In his note, Ross critiqued the experiment only gently, making a case for its illustrative value. “It showed what could happen and made us all think about exactly why it unfolded as it did,” he wrote.

Ross questions the study’s application to a standard U.S. prison, where employees’ roles are more circumscribed than those of

One word comes up repeatedly when people describe Zimbardo: “Showman.”

His fame is entwined with his ability to captivate public attention with his work, setting his sights on not only journals but also TED Talks, late night shows and Congressional hearings. For many admirers, this showmanship is a strength that helped Zimbardo fill classrooms and draw students to his field: Zimbardo taught his courses with the same theatrical flair that characterized his prison study, from the hypnosis demonstrations to the blaring music that opened each class and that Zimbardo selected to match his subject matter.

A lecture on memory might begin with Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were,” a class on the prison experiment with Santana’s “Evil Ways.”

The academic world can be suspicious of those who cater readily to a general audience.

One former Ph.D. said that in a way, Zimbardo was ahead of his time – a zealous communicator who sought out wide impact long before the likes of Malcolm Gladwell led more academics to embrace popular science.

But Susan Brennan Ph.D. ’90, now a psychology professor at Stony Brook University, suggests Zimbardo’s ambitions were not so out of step with those of the department.

Yes, Zimbardo was a showman, “But we were being trained to be a certain kind of impactful scientist,” she said.

As a graduate student at Stanford in the late ‘80s, Brennan recalls being coached by other faculty in the art of presentation to a general audience. “They would say, ‘Well this is all well and good, but it’s just not very interesting, you need to be upfront about the interesting part,’” Issue 2 | 21

“It’s important to get it right. But to me, it’s equally important to make it interesting. And in academia there’s not as much value on making things interesting.”

– Philip Zimbardo

22 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

she said. “‘You don’t need to present all the details.’”

“That’s true in a good talk,” Brennan said, but in a research report it’s crucial to share the nitty-gritty elements that allow others to reproduce your work.

“I’ve since come to believe that it’s super, super important to be careful about the message you convey,” she said. She thinks her field’s mindset is shifting similarly amid handwringing over failed replications, although she’s bothered by certain trends, like popular journals’ publication of quick-read articles with “gee-whiz findings” but few details. “I don’t like it, in general, when the need to be a showman outweighs the need to be accurate and precise and to craft a message appropriately.”

Zimbardo’s CV is lengthy, his publications in the hundreds, his research spanning everything from shyness to how our concepts of time influence our thoughts and behavior. Much of his work, Brennan says, is respected and wellreplicated.

However, having studied experimental design and the way that even an experimenter’s gender can alter the way subjects behave, she has little confidence in the prison study’s results after reading this summer about details that never made it into the standard story.

“If you tell an undergrad what you’re expecting, even if you signal it without telling them, most of them will try to give you what you want,” she said.

Brennan’s most vivid memory of Zimbardo, from back when she worked as his teaching assistant, involves butting heads with the professor when she felt that his efforts to entertain during a lecture became inappropriate. Older than most of her peers and emboldened by her pre-Ph.D. years working in tech, Brennan said, she emailed Zimbardo to suggest changing some images on presentation slides that she thought could come across as sexist.

She says she remembers one slide in particular, of a blonde woman posed provocatively on Stanford’s campus, that struck her as problematic – it was meant to jokingly illustrate why Zimbardo came west to the University. By Brennan’s account, Zimbardo replied to her email on editing the slides along the lines of, “not necessary.”

Zimbardo denies responding that way and said that, on the contrary, he used the slide as launchpad for discussion before cutting it. By his account, he mentioned the issue during his next class, asking for a show of hands to indicate who found the slide offensive and inquiring why no one else had challenged him to remove it. “I would have been impressed if he had [done that],” Brennan said – she says the discussion ended with Zimbardo’s email.

As a teacher, Zimbardo recounted, he regularly encouraged students to speak against

him and spent 10 minutes of class time each week on an “open microphone” session in which class members could criticize anything he’d said.

“That’s something I did which was unique,” he said.

Zimbardo takes issue with the “showman” descriptor and its potentially critical implications. Holding a large lecture class’s attention and making students care about your material is hard, he said. There’s nothing wrong with being an entertainer.

Several former Ph.D.s felt the same way, praising Zimbardo’s compelling presence in the classroom. He was a beloved teacher to many: Emailing the professor after this year’s homecoming weekend, one alum recounted that, when asked to sum up their Stanford experience in a word, some people volunteered the name “Zimbardo.”

“His undergraduate introductory psychology classes were so popular that at one time there was some discussion about whether they could be held in the football stadium,” wrote Craig Anderson M.A. ’78 Ph.D. ’80, now a psychology professor at Iowa State University, in an email to The Daily. “Stanford University has benefited greatly from having him on the faculty.”

And Zimbardo is open about his desire to rivet audiences.

“I’m always thinking of, how can I frame it, how can I say it so my mother would say, ‘you know what, that’s interesting,’” he said in the Stanford News video marking his farewell lecture in 2007. “It’s important to get it right.

But to me, it’s equally important to make it interesting. And in academia there’s not as much value on making things interesting.”

“There’s not the world of academia and the general public,” he added. “It’s people. People with different levels of education, people with different levels of interest, and I want to reach the world.”

Psychology, and in particular social psychology, offers research findings with broad appeal and applicability to everyday lives: It tell us that we can achieve our goals with a “growth mindset,” that children mimic violence they see on TV, or that we view rudeness as a sign of power. But Wandell, the former psychology chair, thinks the desire for great impact is a common denominator at Stanford. “We like to think of ourselves more than most universities do as a university that thinks hard on topics that matter,” he said.

“When we fail, we can fail pretty big,” Wandell added. “And when we succeed, we succeed big.”

Disputed lessons For the students who responded to an ad for study participants back in 1971, the longevity of talk around the Stanford Prison Experiment

is bewildering.

Some participants in the study feel vindicated

by Blum, Le Texier and others’ findings. Others are confused at why, half a century later, they’re still talking about something that seemed at first like just another odd summer job.

What memories they still have of the experiment offer something for all sides.

Jim Rowney, an incoming freshman at UC Berkeley at the time of the experiment, signed up to earn $15 a day without any notion that he would participate in something important.

He was saving up for a stereo for his room and thought little of the experiment after it ended.

He was incredulous when, nearly 30 years later, he got a call from ‘‘60 Minutes.’’

The incredulity grew when the ‘‘60 Minutes’’ reporter began speaking of violence and drawing parallels to Nazi Germany – Rowney remembered the prison experiment as “a crappy way to make 60 bucks.”

By his fifth day in Jordan Hall’s mock prison, Rowney was filthy. His whole stay at the Stanford Prison, he never showered, and the books he’d brought to entertain himself were confiscated. Finally, he wanted out. After asking to meet with someone in charge – he can’t remember whom – he began to cry.

Two other prisoners had left early by then, after succumbing to what Zimbardo and his fellow researchers described as breakdowns induced by the stress of their role.

Rowney doesn’t remember whether he thought the other prisoners’ breakdowns were “real” or not. Regardless, he’s skeptical that his or the other students’ meltdowns show something novel about social roles’ ability to transform healthy students.

“It was more the fact that your privileges and movements and everything else we take for granted was restricted,” he said. “It was very uncomfortable. The beds were uncomfortable.

The pillows were uncomfortable. Everything was uncomfortable … It was not quite what [prisoners] expected.”

Who wouldn’t have been upset? he argues.

And yet, Rowney remembers moments when he really did fall into his prisoner role, trying to impress guards with his good behavior. The climax was his “parole hearing” on the fourth day of the experiment. He didn’t even know what would happen if the parole board ruled in his favor; he just found himself appealing with all his might.

“When they started asking questions I slipped right into the role of, ‘Hey, I’m trying to be a good prisoner, can I get out,’” he said.

Dave Eshleman, notorious as the harshest of the guards, is unequivocal that his behavior – key to Zimbardo’s narrative – was a charade. As he told Blum and has long said in interviews, he loved acting and was studying the discipline at the time of the experiment. He says he wanted to give the researchers something interesting to

work with; speaking to The Daily, he added that he figured they were spending a lot of money on the study and didn’t want it to go waste. He thinks he might have felt a desire to do “a good job for the boss.”

“Every single day I went in there with the goal of, you know, making it an uncomfortable environment for the prisoners so the researchers would get the results they wanted to get,” he said.

Eshleman doesn’t recall the sort of explicit cues that Blum and Le Texier cite archives for.

All he remembers now is that no one stopped

Zimbardo’s got the interpretation wrong – if what he created was something akin to the equally notorious Milgram experiment, in which experimenters pushed participants to deliver electric shocks to anonymous others.

Aggressive guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment went to troubling lengths to please the people in charge, they say.

Experimental archives show that participants viewed their behavior in the study in different ways. One guard responded to a 1973 follow-up survey on the prison experiment by dismissing his actions as “contrived,” while another wrote

“I think Stanford was Zimbardo’s enabler.”

– John Mark ’73, experiment participant

him as he pushed into meaner territory. Every day, he said, he would take his act a bit further – and no member of the research team stepped in to say, “tone it down.” “So we took that as approval and support,” Eshleman said.

Eshleman’s claim of acting is swept aside in the 60 Minutes piece. “You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t a natural thing?” the reporter, Lesley Stahl, asks him, her voice skeptical.

Interviewing Zimbardo later, she asks him what he makes of Eshleman.

“My sense is that’s a level of sadism that goes above an acting role,” Zimbardo says. “The belligerence, the having them to do pushups, the sit-ups, cleaning toilet bowls, it goes beyond the constraints of the role.”

Zimbardo’s response today is similar, and he points in particular to Eshleman’s sexual degradation of the prisoners at the climax of the study, right before it was called off.

Eshleman, who called this moment the guards’ “ultimate escalation” after “several days of dreaming up news tactics,” said he and his friends drew inspiration from films and fraternity hazing; again, he claims it was all to help the researchers. “With that mindset, you might imagine why few considered whether their actions were ethical,” he wrote in an email.

For Zimbardo, the prisoners’ humiliation is evidence that Eshleman’s role has warped his behavior.

Critics, on the other hand, wonder if

that the worst part of his experience was the “times when [he] really felt the guard role [he] was playing.”

These days, Eshleman is often asked to speak as a guest in classes. His latest visit was to West Valley College, where his friend is a professor.

When the professor announced Eshleman’s visit to her students, they reacted with horror – they thought they were about to meet a psychopath.

“They said, ‘oh my god, he’s a monster,’” Eshleman says. He laughs. “She had to tell them, look I know the guy. He’s very mild, but he’s an actor.”

And yet, Eshleman admits, there’s a certain point at which, as Zimbardo argues, the question of acting or not acting is moot. A Los Angeles Times article from 2004 quotes Doug Korpi, the prisoner who says he faked his breakdown: “When you see it in their eyes, it doesn’t matter if they say they were just acting,” said Korpi. “They were into it.”

Trust In March, months before Le Texier’s book and Blum’s article were published, participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment got a curious email in their inbox.

Titled “Invitation to Participate in Survey about Stanford Prison Study,” the email – Issue Issue22| |23 23

sent under Zimbardo’s name – asked the former guards and prisoners to spend 45 to 60 minutes answering detailed questions about themselves and the experiment, nearly 50 years later. Stanford Psychology Professor Geoffrey Cohen Ph.D. ’98 and his lab created the survey over several years, in consultation with Zimbardo; Cohen says he wanted to reach out to participants in classic studies to probe the lasting influence of certain experiences.

John Mark ’73 knew right away that he wasn’t going to respond. He said he didn’t want to give Zimbardo anything that he could edit, that the researcher could cut and paste to serve his needs.

“I don’t trust him,” Mark said. “I look at what he did with the experiment. And I think you can edit a lot of things to look completely differently. I don’t even give him the satisfaction of sending him back something telling him I think he’s full of shit … I don’t respond.”

He isn’t the only person to withhold. Cohen said he has yet to examine the study’s results but lamented that just six or seven of some 20 participants replied.

Mark thinks the story of the Stanford Prison Experiment will, in the end, be about the psychology of the researcher rather than the psychology of his subjects. “In the long run, it’s gonna say more about Zimbardo … than what he wrote about before he was questioned,” Mark said.

Mark signed up for the Stanford Prison Experiment believing he would be part of something noteworthy, after a close scare in which he was almost arrested in a foreign country left him particularly sensitive to the

plight of prisoners. His sympathies for the underdog made him a dismal guard, called out by name in researchers’ notes for his reluctant performance.

Mark is the guard in the archival recording of a researcher urging a participant to be tougher; he has no memory of the exchange, but he recognizes his voice in the audio.

By the end of the experiment, Mark said, he felt used, angry about the conditions inflicted on participants and the way prisoners and guards were pitted against each other. The longer Mark mulls over those six days from 1971, he can’t help but feel that Stanford, a place he loves, let Zimbardo get away with questionable work.

“I think Stanford was Zimbardo’s enabler,” he says. If Wandell believes Stanford has a special responsibility to make sure the Stanford Prison Experiment is properly understood, then Mark believes Stanford’s already been negligent.

Study participants who spoke with The Daily blame the media, too. They said journalists have been as eager as Zimbardo to tell a captivating story, editing irregularities in people’s accounts out of pieces or dogging them for the answers they expect to hear. Eshleman, the guard, recalls telling an interviewer at one point, “You’re asking all the wrong questions.” Rowney, similarly, remembers feeling like 60 Minutes went after Eshleman, drawing out the sinister in his responses.

“I mean, they really made him look bad,” Rowney said.

Even when participants are quoted, their views can be downplayed – as in one 2015 New York Post article that rounded up many critical voices.The reporter spoke to Eshleman as well

as a highly skeptical scholar; in her research, she also came across Mark’s disavowals and the Stanford Daily op-ed attributed to Prescott.

All these people are heard out in the body of the piece. But the headline still reads, “Inside the twisted experiment that turned students into evil sadists.”

‘Food fights’ While some participants say the prison experiment has eroded their trust in Zimbardo and the media, Laura Freberg – a psychology professor at California Polytechnic State University and the president of the Western Psychological Association (WPA) – worries about how to acknowledge her field’s “food fights” without eroding students’ trust in psychology as a discipline. She believes these scientific disputes are healthy, a sign that things are working properly. Psychologists are “crabby bunch of people,” she says, and if you can find a room where everyone agrees, something is probably wrong.

But how do you do justice to a finding with many asterisks in the public sphere? Or in an introductory psych class?

“You are walking a tightrope,” she said. “You want people to think that we know what we’re doing. So if we present a conclusion in class, you want the students to have some faith … But at the same time you want to encourage critical thinking and skepticism.”

Freberg is up-front that she’s fond of Zimbardo, having interacted with him in the context of the WPA. Zimbardo’s wife, a

Courtesy of Stanford Libraries Zimbardo and his fellow researchers turned Jordan Hall, Stanford’s psychology building, into a mock jail for their experiment.

24 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

Courtesy of Stanford Libraries Several guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment have been critical of the study and its findings. One claims he was just acting; Zimbardo says his behavior went “beyond” that.

respected psychologist at UC Berkeley, will take over as the organization’s head next year. Freberg admires Zimbardo career and, in particular, his recent work on cultivating people’s capacity for heroism, his pivot from evil to good.

A researcher with “a lot of respect for the classic studies” who once sparred with her textbook coauthor over whether to include the prison experiment, Freberg says she’s enjoyed watching Zimbardo and his critics parry, although she worries that he’s taken the jabs too personally and that detractors can pile on to the point of viciousness. She wonders if the contentiousness of discussion around the replication crisis might scare younger researchers, who see older professors taking highly personal hits for their work.

“You made a mistake in your interpretation or whatever, so that means you’re not a worthy psychology anymore – that’s really destructive, and I don’t want that message going out there to younger scholars,” she said. “That’s very stifling, I think.”

In a show of unity, two researchers that have been at odds with Zimbardo for years – the professors behind the BBC prison study with contradictory findings – recently signed a joint statement with Zimbardo and his fellow researcher on the prison experiment, Craig Haney. The statement affirms scientific common ground and backs off personal criticisms, despite Le Texier and Blum’s suggestions that Zimbardo misled the public about key parts of his study.

“We regret instances in which our statements appeared to involve ad hominem criticisms or used intemperate language,” the four researchers state. “Although it is legitimate to debate the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and meaning of

research reports, we have no definitive evidence that any signatory of this statement committed scientific fraud or deliberately misled others about their research findings.”

UC Davis’s Vazire, on the other hand, thinks it’s fair to criticize the scientist as well as the finding when it seems the scientist has been negligent. If a researcher is sloppy, she said, “We do have, I think, a lot of discomfort in calling that out.” She thinks critics can stay respectful without pulling punches.

“Some people think you shouldn’t even use their name, you should just refer to it as the Stanford Prison Experiment or whatever – the study without naming the researcher,” she said.

“But nobody thinks that when we’re saying positive things about the study.”

“I think there’s this asymmetry that researchers want all the fame and glory and credit that comes with positive attention to their work,” she continued. “But if it’s criticism, even valid criticism, then all of a sudden it’s really important that we keep it completely impersonal.”

Within her specialty, neuroscience, Freberg has witnessed many once-accepted studies be undermined by new advances in MRI technology. The traditionally exorbitant cost of such tools meant that many early experiments built conclusions off of tiny samples of 10 or 15 people – a statistical headache. She’s watched some scientists take blows to their work gracefully: Take, for example, a professor at UCLA whose studies on social exclusion weren’t replicated. The professor had found that a dinner or party snub lights up the same brain circuit that’s activated by the physical pain of, say, whacking your shin.

“That’s a great story, I love that story,” Freberg says. She used to feature it in her textbook.

But the research doesn’t hold up. The UCLA professor had to acknowledge the study’s faults, and move on.

Freberg has also watched scientists under fire dig in their heels. “It’s very difficult for people to accept the idea that maybe they don’t have as strong a case,” she says.

“Science,” she remarks later, “is a very human process.”

Zimbardo remains invested in his seminal study’s preservation in academia and popular culture, even as he expresses frustration with people’s fixation on one part of his long career.

He said that those he consulted about his official response to prison experiment critics had to continually advise him to tone it down, to meet his doubters in the middle.

But the way Freberg talks, you’d think the Stanford Prison Experiment controversy was just a blip, something Zimbardo can set aside.

He hasn’t shied away from public appearances following the furor over his early work. His alumni weekend lecture in October drew 300 audience members, and his Twitter account promotes recent and upcoming visits to everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Sigmund Freud University in Vienna. The former American Psychological Association head is a star at conventions and talks, sitting for hours to give autographs.

He’s slated to speak at the WPA’s annual conference in April.

“Come on down to Pasadena,” Freberg says.

“We’re gonna have a good time, and you can get a selfie with Phil Zimbardo.”

Contact Hannah Knowles at hknowles@stanford. edu.

Issue 2 | 25

From life on the sea to life as a tree

by Elena Shao

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estor Walters ’21 walks into CoHo — phone in hand, GoogleMaps on the screen — after his morning Math 51 lecture. He’s not late, but explains with a laugh that he didn’t know where to find the campus coffee shop and had been looking for it along the Row. Thirty years old and fresh out of the Navy, Walters isn’t your typical Stanford student. And he certainly didn’t travel to the University in a typical manner.

Instead, he chose to bike more than 1,000 miles — from his uncle’s Seattle home to Stanford’s campus — before the first day of classes.

But Walter’s bike ride meant more than a test of physical endurance. He dedicated the trip to educational resources, such as Khan Academy, that helped him get into Stanford in the first place. He made it a point to finish the trip in 6.28 days.

“It’s two times pi,” he explained. “Duh.” Walters is lighthearted and open, willing to discuss his history as a combat medic and Navy SEAL. Before I can even get to asking questions, though, he wants to learn more about me.

His eagerness to learn tipped me off to the nature of his journey — his international upbringing, his unorthodox educational background and his changing views on religion and science.

Walters hopes a mathematics degree from Stanford will help him apply his unique experiences toward his end goal of making the world a better place.

Walters’ childhood was far from typical.

He was born in Bangladesh, but moved around frequently. His family eventually settled down in Greece, where he had his first real classroom experience “I was homeschooled growing up,” he explains. “My parents were ‘missionaries.’

And I’m using quotes here because they were really in a religious cult.”

Walters declined to provide specific details about the cult on the basis of protecting his parents’ privacy, but did say that members were taught basic language skills.

“So it was not exactly Board of Education material,” he described it in a blog post on Facebook.

Thus, when Walter started elementary school in an unfamiliar country that spoke a language he barely knew, he struggled at first even with basic communication.

“But when I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson explain evolution, I’m like — are you kidding me?

”

“I was sitting in the front row,” he said, recounting his first day of second grade.

“And the teacher said, ‘Hey, do you need a friend?’ And I didn’t know anyone, so I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I need a friend.’ But she comes back with two pieces of paper.”

He would later learn that the Greek words for “friend” and “paper” are homophones.

As a result of the language barrier, Walters did poorly in many of his classes, receiving grades that were barely above average and frequently getting into fights with his classmates. He grew to hate the concept of sitting in a classroom and learning from a chalkboard — a sentiment he would carry through later schooling as well.

At 19, Walters decided to immigrate to the U.S. He had previously been to the country only once, for an uncle’s wedding when he was eight years old.

Although Walters wanted to join the Coast Guard, he was turned down. He instead ended up joining the Navy as a combat medic, serving in Afghanistan.

When he returned to the U.S., he entered training to become a Navy SEAL, going on to serve with the group for about five years.

While serving in the Navy, Walters began taking night classes at Hawaii Pacific University. The Navy allows active duty sailors to pursue their education, but Walters had to do so in his own time. He recounts waking up at 5 a.m. to study, going to work by 7:30 a.m. and getting home at 7 p.m. to do homework.

“Some classes were online and some were in-classroom, but the classroom ones crammed a whole week’s worth of material into a single three-hour evening session,” he said. “There were no sections and no school-based tutoring. We just showed up once a week for class and didn’t see each other again until the next week.”

When I asked him why he decided to pursue education despite it being so difficult, his answer surprised me: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

It all started with an episode of Tyson’s science documentary series, “Cosmos.”

Walters wasn’t taught evolution in high school; he was taught creationism. The public school he attended taught biology and history using creation theory, starting with the story of the biblical flood 6,500 years ago.

“But when I watched Neil deGrasse Tyson explain evolution, I’m like — are you kidding me?” he recalls. “This whole time, I spent 25 years not understanding this, and all of a sudden I wanted to understand this and understand that.”

‘You can learn anything’ For Walters, online YouTube videos were more than just an additional resource to comb through to prepare for an Advanced Placement exam. During his days with the Navy, they were his entire mathematics curriculum, as easy to access as Googling “Free Online Math Classes.”

“In a video called ‘You Can Learning Anything,’ Sal Khan convinced me that even I, someone who was taught Creationism in history class and and held a fierce resentment for classrooms, could still learn,” Walters wrote in a Facebook post.

Walters originally used the videos to prepare for college classes. He tested out of Algebra, moved on to Precalculus and then tested out of that as well.

“Then I was like, there’s no way this is Issue 2 | 27 MALIA MENDEZ/The Stanford Daily

going to work for Calculus,” he said.

But he tested out of that too.

Walters continued to visit the Khan Academy website during his four-year college experience, teaching himself mathematics and taking night classes in computer science. Until earlier this year, he was still serving in the Navy as well.

“The problem with the Navy was that I wasn’t really … good,” he said. “I mean, I was fine at the practical stuff. I can shoot, skydive, dive, whatever. But I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, so I got in trouble a lot.”

Walters was eventually fired from being a SEAL for his unruly behavior. He had the choice of staying in the Navy and finishing his time or leaving and enduring a lessthan-ideal discharge status. It was around Walter’s departure from the Navy that his brother convinced him to apply to more

traditional, top-tier colleges.

“I had to kind of roll the dice and say, ‘Okay, do I want to bank on this 0.01 percent chance that I get into a good university as a transfer student, or play it safe with the Navy?’” he told me. “It came down to knowing what my life would look like if I stayed down that path, and so I had to sort of just jump off a cliff and build

“In a way, I didn’t really choose Stanford.

Stanford chose me. ”

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my wings on the way down.”

From Dec. 2017 through March 2018, Walters prepared his college applications, writing and rewriting his application essays multiple times. He took the SAT for the first time in his life, at 30 years old, having only found out about the exam two days before the deadline to register.

When asked whether he ever expected to get into Stanford, Walters’ short M answer was “No.” His long answer: there was a moment after writing a specific draft IA

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of his personal essay where he thought he might get in.

He called the first couple drafts of his essay “awful.” But what they turned into was a raw and heartfelt expression of his experiences. He not only wrote about his Navy experience as a combat medic, but also about how interacting with different people, reading books and learning on his own gave him the knowledge and experience to make the world a better place.

“I remember the day that I decided I was going to write that essay — I was crying all morning,” he said. “But that’s when I realized that I have all this to say, and if a person reads this, and it resonates with them, then I might have a chance.”

It turns out that he had more than just a chance. Walters was also accepted to Princeton and Yale, but ultimately selected the Farm as his new home. That made me curious — why Stanford?

Walters said that Princeton was the school he initially looked into because his older brother went there. His brother was always the ambitious one in the family, studying rigorously, taking part in an IB program and getting accepted to Princeton as an international student.

But although those were all good reasons, Walters’ choice of Stanford ultimately came down to finding the right fit.

“I kind of felt like the Ivies — considering that I’m kind of a rebel — wouldn’t be ideal for me,” he says. “In a way, I didn’t really choose Stanford. Stanford chose me, by being the only top-tier school where I felt like I could go and still be myself.”

The funny thing is that if he had never been fired from his position at the Navy, he might never have applied to Stanford and he wouldn’t be here today.

“It was the quintessential idea that the thing that’s the obstacle turns out to be the greatest thing to happen to you,” he said.

Why bike?

When asked why he decided to bike all the way from home to Stanford, Walters laughed, recalling what it was like when he found out he got accepted.

“My first reaction was, ‘No way. I don’t deserve this,’” he said.

For him, there were two main motivations behind the bike trip: to prove to himself that he was worthy of attending a school like Stanford — being a “Navy guy” just meant that the best way to celebrate enrollment was with a physical challenge — and to give back to Khan Academy, the online program that propelled him academically.

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“I did go through a phase where I thought, ‘Should I even do this?’” Walters said. “But I realized while I was doing the riding that what I really wanted was to do something challenging because I just like doing challenging things.”

C ou rte sy of Ne st

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Facing forward

this is still my favorite thing to say — I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.

”

After sharing his story online and in his life, people started reaching out to him for guidance.

He found himself starting conversations and passing along advice.

“What I care about in that regard is reaching out to people like me, who, like 24-year-old Nestor, would not have paid attention, would not have listened [or] been open to new ideas,” he said. “But that’s because he doesn’t know any better. He didn’t know that he was a bad student — he just thought that he was stupid.”

Walters hopes to continue spreading this message, along with other lessons he learned throughout his multifarious life experiences. “[With the right tools,] kids and adults around the world will be better equipped, inspired, and encouraged to improve themselves,” he writes on his blog. “Those better people make better citizens, better neighbors, better communities, and a better world.”

Contact Elena Shao at eshao98@stanford.edu.

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Walters called his bike trip Ride or Pi, and turned it into an effort to raise funds for people, such as Sal Khan, who provide educational services online for free. Walters started a campaign to raise awareness, made social media pages and filmed fun videos documenting the journey for his Instagram account. Although he mostly biked alone, Walters gave thanks to his older brother Mike, who slept in his car for six days to follow him around and make sure he was safe.

“It was ridiculous,” he said. “And to this day — this is still my favorite thing to say — I have no idea what I’m doing. I didn’t then, and I don’t now.”

The themed fundraiser did not do as well as he had hoped — he did not reach his fundraising goal, and most of his following came from his family and friends.

At Hawaii Pacific, Walters studied computer science, the only STEM degree offered through the university. At Stanford, however, Walters is looking to diversify.

“I knew I wanted to do STEM, because I want to work for NASA,” he said. “But what I don’t know is exactly which path to take to get there. I’d heard that math was a really good starting point — no matter what in STEM you do, you’re going to need math — so I thought I would just start with that and see where it takes me.”

When asked if he hopes to continue spreading awareness about the importance of education while at Stanford, his answer was an enthusiastic yes. He first described the difficulty of opening up and exposing personal experiences online and to people in his life — especially experiences that don’t reflect positively on his character. Regardless, he said that he likes 30-year-old Nestor a lot more than 20- or 25-year-old Nestor.

“And to this day —

Issue 2 | 29

DATA-DRIVEN CARTOONS

By Joe Dworetzky Joe Dworetzky is a 2018 DCI Fellow (c) 2018 Jay Dworetzky

30 | The Stanford Daily Magazine

Crossword

by Grant Coalmer

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Need help?

Solutions online at stanforddaily.com 7

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1

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Clues Across:

Down:

1. Flights connect them 2. Day before All Saints’ Day 3. Close to Oxford, blue 4. ___ Double 5. Thursday feast

6. Toxophilite’s sport 7. Susceptible to yawns 8. Cheerfully optimistic, red 9. Indoor, beach and grass sport 10. It’s sometimes “junk” 11. One of the 13 original US states 12. Correctional institution

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