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Doubt Yourself: The Power of a Narrative �1

Doubt Yourself: The Power of a Narrative

Noah McCathern

University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa

Spring 2016


Abstract

This paper will examine the narrativization of Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison

Experiment” covered in the 2015 film adaptation of the same name. Many people who look at

the Stanford Prison Experiments [SPE] from the 1970’s say I would never have treated another

human being like that; however, The 2015 film adapation of the SPE’s brought me to question

that statement. The paper will use Mcclure’s “Narrative Paradigm” (McClure, 2009) to draw

conclusions about human nature, and the persuasive power of a strong narrative. This paper will

serve as an investigation into the research question: how can a narrative create identification

between audience members and those characters who’s actions they find morally reprehensible?


INTRODUCTION:

This paper will examine the narrativization of Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison

Experiment” covered in the 2015 film adaptation of the same name. Many people who look at

the Stanford Prison Experiments [SPE] from the 1970’s say I would never have treated another

human being like that; however, The 2015 film adapation of the SPE’s brought me to question

that statement. This disidentification came after following the experiments in a narrativized form.

The paper will use Mcclure’s “Narrative Paradigm” (McClure, 2009) to draw conclusions about

human nature, and the persuasive power of a strong narrative. This paper will serve as a

definitive answer to the research question: how can a narrative be created that would bring an

individual to doubt themselves? The lens that will be most prominent in this paper is

Identification. Identification is comprehending or associating with another person’s perspective

or actions. I will be examining how humans identify with one another through narrativization.

ARTIFACT:

The artifact I will use to explain the power of narratives is Kyle Alvarez’s 2015 film

adaptation of the SPE. This film is particular to this case due to its empathic effects on its

viewers. This film adaptation gives its audience something much easier to identify with than just

a report somewhere, or still photos on a slide show. Alvarez presents the SPE’s from a

participant’s perspective, rather than from an observer’s. That is why his film is rhetoric and

needs to be examined. It presents a new perspective on its subject, and effectively adds impact to

the implications and conclusions reached by Zimbardo and his team of psychologists. The

character that best exemplifies the qualities being examined is the guard participant called “John

Wayne”. He starts his introductory survey to the experiment by saying that he would prefer to be


a prisoner because “Everyone hates the guards”. By the end of the experiment however, John

Wayne has become the guard that is most abusive to the prisoners. He humiliates them, feminizes

them, and degrades them. He wants them to lose their self-image. This is a complete turn from

the John Wayne that we met a mere 6 days before, and that change in this character, and the

narrative’s ability to identify that change with the audience is what this paper is based on.

METHOD:

The method I will be using to explain how narratives can be such powerful sources of

persuasion is a generative technique that comes from the artifact, rather than a set method of

rhetorical criticism. I will be using McClure’s “Narrative Paradigm” as a sort of reference in

following and analyzing the narrative itself, followed by a breakdown of why this narrative

proves itself to be so much more persuasive than the objective scientific journal write-ups that

were used to document these events in years’ past. McClure’s Narrative paradigm is different

from the traditional narrative style of rhetorical criticism in that it’s focus is on two things. First,

all human beings are basically story tellers, that values, emotions, and aesthetic considerations

xground our beliefs and behaviors. Secondly, it says that our decision making and

communications are based on subjectivity, and “good reasons” or that a different situation will

require a different action, that you have to be in the moment to understand why something was

done the way it was. (McClure, 2009). I will be applying a lens of identification for the

evaluation of the artifact, looking for important pieces of the discourse that allow the audience to

more closely relate to the characters and their actions. For example: in gangster movies, we often

see family feuds and retaliational violence. This violence is often not viewed as murder, but

rather as a justified action following grievous provocation. This shows that being able to identify,


and relate to a character is essential when it comes to a strong narrative persuasion. This is the

type of thing I will be looking for when analyzing the SPE movie. These pieces will include

emotional appeals, identification, and perception. Emotional appeals are when the director

includes a scene in the movie that he knows will pull on the heart strings of the audience.

Identification is when an audience identifies with or can consubstantiate themselves with the

characters presented. Perception is how the audience views the film, like who’s point of view the

narrative is coming from.

ANALYSIS:

EMOTIONAL APPEALS:

The movie follows the lives of the participants and researchers surrounding the

Stanford Prison Experiment that occurred in August of 1971. The movie opens with the head

researcher, professor Zimbardo, having a romantic time with his girlfriend and ex-student. They

appear to be in love, and he seems to treat her right. This is purposeful, in that the film producer

did not need to include this in the film to tell the story of the experiments. In fact, it was actually

a superfluous scene as far as the actual plot of the movie goes. What this shows us is that the

director is trying to show the audience the human side of Zimbardo, the side that the audience

can relate to. This relation of the audience to the character begins to form a powerful bond. This

is done again in the scenes where the participants speak with their loved ones, and are arrested in

front of their families. This is purposeful. A study recently performed by the Centre for Language

Studies showed that this relation of the audience to a character can greatly influence the

audience’s attitude towards that character’s actions. (Hoeken, 2014). This study showed that an

audience that identified with a story character was more likely to percieve an unjust outcome as


acceptable, than an audience that did not relate to the story character. This is because the

audience can see bits and pieces of themselves in the characters. This means that the audience

could see themselves in the same situation as the story, and therefore could more easily justify

the actions of the characters to their own actions. This changes rhetoric by changing the way we

report events. When these experiments happened, they were published in scientific journals, dry

and full of statistics and numbers. The story then moved onto newspapers, which added a bit of

color to the events, but never fleshed out any real characters. Then the events were taught to

students on slides of pictures and rolls of silent film, but these also never made any attempts at

providing a narrative or creating relateable characters. It wasn’t until Kyle Alvarez’s film

adaptation that a narrative was constructed, characters were built and displayed, and emotions

were brought into the mix. This new mixing of emotions into previously objective reporting was

unheard of until recently, and film adaptations of true events have become immensely popular

since.

IDENTIFICATION:

The movie then goes on to the interviewing process of the experiments, where every

single participant said they would prefer to be a prisoner than a guard. This is a huge piece of

narrative persuasion because it shows the status quo of the participants. They aren’t power

hungry, violent, cruel people. These are just college kids looking to make some money before

school starts again. This “uniqueness” or setting up of a base line is essential to see the

transformation that takes place in the characters of the participants. The characters are

introduced, and their interview scene really starts the audience’s bond with the participants of the

study.


The next important scene is the scene where the researchers randomly assign the

participants to their new positions as either prisoners or guards. This scene could’ve been cut out,

shortened, or otherwise edited, but the director kept it in full, as a message to the audience. This

message is that that they had no say in who got what position. They show an extended bit of the

researchers flipping a coin, which is important to the audience because it shows that the

participants weren’t chosen based on previous inclinations, or judgements of character, but rather

that they were all basically the same kind of person, and that their situation altered their

character. This is essential to the audience’s identification with the characters because it shows

that the events could have happened to anyone, regardless of character traits, past actions, and

any other seperating factors really. Their circumstances dictated their actions. This is a crucial

component to a persuasive narrative because it establishes an anxiety within the audience, a fear

that the events described could happen to anyone. That the results and findings of the study apply

to everyone. This makes the behaviors that are shown in the narrative seem reasonable and even

just in the eyes of the audience. The audience could put themselves in the character’s shoes.

PERCEPTION:

In the beginning of the experiments, the prisoners are brought in to “intake” and the

guards follow a script by which they are told they should follow to act like proper “guards”. At

first, they follow it to the letter, obviously uncomfortable with the tasks they are having the

prisoners perform, but after the first day the guards begin to go off script, creating their own

rules, punishments, having unscheduled line-ups, unwritten rules, and more. This is the start of

the change that takes place in the guards. They begin to realize that they have unlimited power

within their role as guards. They can do as they please without retribution. They have unlimited


and unrestricted power within their role. This is dangerous because it shows the audience what

led to the radical behaviors exhibited from all the participants later in the experiments. This

abuse of power is a very relatable idea to audiences everywhere, as everyone knows and can

identify with a person that is carried away with their own authority. This shows the inciting

incidents for the rapid progression of the guards’ character from innocent naivety towards jaded

cruelty. Small abuses of prisoners become common, even banal little incidents, and so the

punishments become larger and larger, more and more humiliating as time goes on. Getting

carried away with exponential growth like this is quite common in the world, athletes always

want to get stronger, so they do more weight at the gym than the day before. This stepping up

type of progression is a powerful motivator when it comes to abusive behaviors. It is very

destructive. This is apparent in drug abuse as well, with heroin addicts, each dose needs to be

larger than the last in order for the drug to have its euphoric effects on the abuser. This stepping

up is to chase the feeling that the user got when they had no tolerance to the drug. This is how

overdoses happen. This exponential acceleration of the narrative is an imperative part of the

persuasive efficacy of these types of films. This is called a “slippery slope”, and it can make

many actions that would seem absurd at the beginning of a narrative, reasonable by the end.

These slippery slopes are used in lots of films that attempt to document real-life events because

of the anxiety that can be cast upon the audience from the fear that things will progress too far.

Later in the film, the graduate researchers come to Zimbardo asking to cancel the

experiment, and what stands out to me is his reasoning for not wanting to cancel it. The movie

does an excellent job of setting the audience up to see how important this experiment was to

Zimbardo. This was going to be his legacy, his contribution to society, his big accomplishment


that would keep him in conversations long after his death. When you look at it that way, it is very

easy to see why Zimbardo would hesitate to call off the experiment. When reading the published

lab report for psychology class, my class had a discussion about why the experiment wasn’t

called off the second things got physical, or that people were harmed, and no one could come up

with a reason. Now, having watched the film, the audience can easily follow the motivations

surrounding Zimbardo, and why he thought he was justified in his actions. This relates to the

main idea of this paper, what can make an audience identify with characters who’s actions are

unjust? Following this narrative it becomes incredibly clear, that if an audience identifies with a

character, their judgements and ideas can be altered by the character’s actions. What once was a

huge malpractice suit against Zimbardo now appears to be more of a man’s defense of what he

hopes will be his legacy. This is because we are viewing the narrative through his eyes, his

perspective.

CONCLUSION:

The findings of my analysis definitively correlate an audience’s identification with the

emotions of a character, to the justification of unjust actions performed by that character. The

narrative provided by Alvarez’s Stanford Prison Experiment, allows the audience to become

deeply connected with the characters in the story. The audience follows the progression of the

events in a way only recently developed, shedding new light onto the motivations behind the

events, and their consequences. This apathy where the audience can get into the character’s

perspective and see their justifications for their actions is a very powerful appeal in narrative

persuasion, where McClure says “narratives remind us of who we are and who we have been,


and who we may become”(McClure, 2009). These narratives relate objective events to audiences

in subjective terms, and add emotion to an otherwise emotionless argument. They can be used to

justify radical ideas, actions, and events, and that is how this type of rhetoric has become so

effectively persuasive in the world of discourse. Bringing emotion into the reporting of otherwise

emotionless events helps an audience to relate to the characters actions within the narrative, and

can be used to make cautionary tales that tell us the dangers of human nature. Further, narratives

can be used to document things that before were completely left out of mainstream public

attention, such as medical advances, vaccine developments, and more. These things would

normally be left to scientific journals, but now can be displayed in a format that the general

public will more likely be able to consume. This benefits our society by bringing digestible

information to the people, allowing them to better themselves through learning and education.


REFERENCES:

'It’s still a prison to me': A new dramatic film portrayal of the Stanford Prison Experiment. 2016.

By: Dunn, Dana S., PsycCRITIQUES, 15540138, 20160101, Vol. 61, Issue 3

Resurrecting the Narrative Paradigm: Identification and the Case of Young Earth Creationism

By: K. McClure RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Spring 2009, Vol. 39 Issue 2,

p189-211. 23p.

The role of identification and perception of just outcome in evoking emotions in narrative

persuasion. 2014. Hoeken, Sinkeldam. Journal of Communication. Oct2014, Vol. 64

Issue 5, p935-955. 21p. 2 Charts. Communication Source DOI: 10.1111/jcom.12114

“The Stanford Prison Experiment”, 2015 Film Adaption. Directed by Kyle Alvarez

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