Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)

0:28Hey there, Stephen Dubner. psychology. So I hope you enjoy this bonus episode. As always, thanks for listening.

0:46Sometimes you see a piece of theater and it completely scrambles your brain. I remember I was at one of the first performances of Hair. That's Philip Zimbardo, the renowned psychologist Seeing hair scrambled his brain because The performers start walking on the seats over your head And walking down the aisles And that, I had never experienced that before And it was really troubling, exhilarating, confusing Because again, hair was going to confuse you They're going to sing songs about masturbation And black girls having sex with white guys And white guys having sex with black guys So essentially, before the play began, what they did is set up to say, this is going to shock you.

1:30This is going to be off your usual radar. So don't come expecting traditional theater. This is something new. I still remember that. It was like 40 years ago. Again, that was Philip Zimbardo. Does that name ring a bell? If you ever took Psychology 101 in college, think back to that. You remember reading about the Stanford Prison Experiment? That was Zimbardo's experiment back in 1971, in which some student volunteers played the role of prisoners and others acted as guards. Things got ugly fast. Everybody out of here. I don't know what I mean. This experiment, I f***ed up at Zimbardo. Zimbardo died in 2024 at the age of 91.

2:19In his everyday life, he liked messing with people. In many settings I'm in, I tweak my environment to see what would happen. What would happen if, you know, you go into a restaurant and the waiter gives you a thing and you say, I'd like to start with dessert. And he says, what? I'd like to start with dessert. You've got a really good dessert menu. And sometimes he says, no, you can't. No, you have to start with the appetizer. I said, no, I'd like the dessert. I'll work backwards. What difference does it make? by putting people in totally new situations, that's really how we discover something about ourselves.

2:53The sun shining!

3:10This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. with your host, Stephen Dubner.

3:26Okay, so Philip Zimbardo is the man responsible for the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous social science experiments in history. We will hear more about that and some new revelations about the experiment later in this episode. But first, let's get to the real inspiration for today's show. It is a theater piece, an immersive, interactive theater piece called Sleep No More. Sleep No More is the creation of a British theater group called Punch Drunk. It opened in New York in 2011 and ran until January of 2025. Sleep No More is a mashup of Macbeth and Hitchcock and film noir, but it's even stranger than all that.

4:09I don't even know how to describe it. It's insane. I don't know. It is. It's crazy. Sexual and violent. Crazy. Insane. Dead babies involved. Passionate. I don't know. Sleep No More is designed to throw you off balance. It begins before you even go inside. The location is called the McKittrick Hotel, but in fact, it's an old warehouse in Chelsea. The whole thing is cloaked in secrecy. Not really sure what to expect. We were told to know as little as possible, and so we've done almost no research as to what we're about to do. I'm just hoping I can make it all the way through and I don't leave. I don't get too scared.

4:54Just like little tidbits of intrigue. You know, we've heard that you get like a key to a room, apparently. Everyone wears a mask, and you're allowed to look through drawers in the sets. That's about all we know. We heard that it's like psychologically intense. Yeah, psychologically intense. It seems interesting to me.

5:13Psychologically intense, I would agree. Now, what makes it so? Let me offer two thoughts, control and context. First, control. If you are the kind of person who likes to have a lot of control over your surroundings, if you're not exactly a go-with-the-flow type of person, and yes, I'm kind of describing myself here, then Sleep No More presents you with a bit of a challenge. It starts while you're waiting in line on the sidewalk. A bouncer requests a photo ID. Doesn't say why, just requests it. And everybody in line complies wordlessly. Once you're inside, there's a mandatory coat and bag check.

5:55Everything must go. Every computer, every purse. And then you're shuffled through a long, pitch-black hallway.

6:07Out of the blackness, you emerge into a bar. Nice bar, the good jazz band. The place has the feel of a speakeasy, and you're thinking, hey, what year are we in here? You're offered a drink, absinthe perhaps? A fortune teller looks you over from a corner table. After a while, you're summoned into a freight elevator where you are given a mask, a beautifully creepy beaked mask. And then you are told what you may and may not do for the rest of the evening. Here's Tori Sparks. She plays Lady Macbeth. I think it's very telling of who you are and how you interpret those first instructions that you get.

6:53You know, keep your mask on, don't talk, don't use your cell phone. Fortune favors the bold. Yeah. And people enter in and some people just can't handle instructions. They can't handle limitations. They want to talk and you just told them they can't, so they will. And other people are excited by the fact that they get to be anonymous for three hours.

7:18Okay, so you've surrendered your valuables at the door and you're now dispatched on a three-hour adventure about which you were told next to nothing. during which you may not speak, and yet you're also told that fortune favors the bold. So yes, you have given up a bit of control.

7:42Okay, now for the context. Where are we? Where's the stage? Well, there is no stage. Or really, the stage is everywhere. Six floors of warehouse that have been turned into an unbelievably elaborate set. There's an old hotel and a town. There are lodgings for the Macbeths and the Macduffs. There's a grand ballroom, a forest, a hospital, a cemetery. You are allowed to wander anywhere and everywhere, to open drawers and read letters, to eat candy from the glass jars in the sweets shop. It's sort of like a choose-your-own-adventure. So you're sort of forced to like port your own path around the building and find different scenes.

8:27You make your own journey. It's like very personal. It's sexual and leading. But what about the actors? Where are they? I didn't see an actor for like the first 15 minutes, so I thought it was just kind of set decoration everywhere. But then you start seeing them and trying to figure out who they are, their relationships. you think back to what you were told, that fortune favors the bold. And you learn that you have to follow the performers from room to room, even chase them. Or they might bring you with them. A bald woman dragged me up several flights of stairs through staircases into this arena.

9:08And it was incredible. The context is further muddied by the fact that none of the performers actually speak. But over the course of the evening, you will see a lot. Someone hanging themselves was pretty cool. It's like the final, I won't tell you that, sorry. A pregnant woman and her husband having a fight and then making up. Lots of fighting, lots of kissing. Lots of taxidermy. Dry humping. My friend Austin's in it and he gets naked and bloody. so that was pretty crazy it's just uh it's like a nightmare and don't forget it's very dark and you're wearing a mask the mask is utterly critical and without it it wouldn't work or be something very very different that's felix barrett he's the artistic director of punch drunk and co-creator of sleep no more they're faceless they're anonymous so there's that sort of that normal relationship between performer and audience is completely ground down the first time i tried it a middle-aged lady came and apologized me afterwards and said i'm so sorry i put the mask on i found myself being very rude i was getting too close to the performers i even touched one at one point i'm so sorry and you must have said thank you i was like thank you because i didn't even realize how powerful it was but she felt compelled to do it because the mask had given her that freedom.

10:46And as soon as it came off, she remembered who she was and where she was.

10:54The mask does seem to embolden people. Well, I did something I wasn't supposed to do. I saw a dress hanging on the wall because they said not everything is what it seems. So those who take more risks will be rewarded more. So I put on the dress. She was punished. She belonged to one of the actresses. She didn't belong to one of the actresses, so I shouldn't have done it. The thought of being that much more anonymous with a switch of clothing was even more exciting.

11:29One night, Tori Sparks, who plays Lady Macbeth, was dancing inside a sort of glass box. I had a woman, I was performing a solo in the box. and like a crowd filled watching this thing. And for whatever reason, this woman decided she was going to throw objects at the glass. And she found anything. There's not much in this room you can pick up and throw, but she found it all. She went in our drawer, picked up the lipstick, the fur, anything, the wet t-shirts, and just started chucking it as hard as she could at the glass. And fortunately, I was behind glass. I just kept going with what I was doing.

12:09Do you really want to know what's going on in that person's mind then? Or do you just, well, I guess in the moment you're just trying to survive the scene. I was in shock. Just like, you're really making that choice right now. Why? Why would you even think that that's what needs to be done right now? And am I making you mad? Are you trying to mess with me? What's going on? So I just tried to stay in character. And the steward that's in this room, of course, went to try and stop her. And she just, she was like, oh, I didn't know. I just completely clueless. Fortune favors the bold. Exactly. Oh my gosh.

12:41Meanwhile, me and all these other spectators were just like, huh?

12:49Every detail of Sleep No More, the music, the mask, the choreography, has been carefully designed to crush your expectations that going to the theater means just sitting in a square room and watching people on a stage speak their lines. Here's Felix Barrett again. It's completely safe. It just feels, we almost fictionalize, we dimmed it back, we fictionalize a state of tension that feels slightly unsettling and threatening when actually it's not. Before Sleep No More came to New York, it played in Boston in an old school building. We did Boston, the first show, they said health and safety, this is not going to work, it's too dangerous.

13:26So we had to put the lights up and the show didn't work at all. because audience were just walking around nonchalantly, just treating it like a gallery, chatting, because there was no sense of threat. Even though you told them not to talk. Yeah, because here we have this huge swathe of darkness. If that's not there, then there's no mystery.

13:49So how would you behave if you were thrust into an unfamiliar situation, given a set of off-putting rules, and then told to hide behind a mask? That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is Freakonomics Radio.

14:13Sleep No More, for me, was a thrill. Unsettling on many dimensions, but also a thrill. What it really made me think about, however, wasn't Macbeth or Shakespeare or Hitchcock or all the awesomely grisly ideas promoted therein. I was mostly thinking about the audience. What it really made me think about was Philip Zimbardo, his Stanford prison experiment, and how people change their behavior depending on their surroundings. Here's Zimbardo again. One of the things that strikes me about this interesting play is that it puts the audience in a totally new situation. that is audiences have never been asked to wear a mask, play a role, have set of rules to govern their behavior.

15:01In a way, Sleep No More does to the audience every night what social scientists like Zimbardo have been doing in experiments for decades. They put people in a situation, fiddle with the variables, and see how they behave. Like Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments at Yale in the early 1960s to see whether a volunteer would administer an electric jolt to someone if told to do so by an authority figure. I know I keep giving them shocks. Continue, please. I'm up to 390. Continue, please. Continue,

15:40please. Milgram's experiments took place shortly after Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem for Nazi war crimes. Here's Philip Zimbardo again. And as a sidebar, little Stanley Milgram and I were high school classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx in senior year 1948, 49. So essentially, there was something in that water. But it was really, you know, he was a little Jewish kid who worried about, you know, could the Holocaust happen in America? If Hitler said, electrocute somebody, would you do it? Or Hitler's henchman? And everybody said, no, Stanley, we're not that kind of person.

16:19And what he said, as a high school kid, how do you know unless you're in that situation? After the Milgram experiments, Zimbardo got the idea to set up a fake prison at Stanford with some volunteers acting as guards and some as prisoners. And that was the central commonality in the Milgram obedience studies and my Stanford prison study, is we put people in a totally new situation where, in both studies, We gave people total power over someone else.

16:52The experiment was designed to go on for two weeks. 24 volunteers, all male college students, were randomly divided into inmates and guards. The inmates were arrested at their homes and brought to a makeshift prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. Immediately, their individuality was taken away. The guards called them by ID number rather than name. They wore stocking caps to cover their hair and a short smock with no underwear. The guards, too, were dressed alike, essentially becoming anonymous. And the guards not only were in uniforms, but they had it with silver-reflecting sunglasses, an idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke.

17:33It didn't take long for the situation to curdle. 416, you got your hands in the air. Why don't you play Frankenstein? This is your brother. 2093, you can be the bride of Frankenstein. You stand here. You come over there. You be the bride of Frankenstein, and you be Frankenstein. I want you to walk over here like Frankenstein and say that you love 2093.

17:57A third of the guards started to exploit their authority, taunting prisoners, making them simulate sodomy, clean toilets with their bare hands. Zimbardo himself began to play a role. I began to be the prison superintendent. I see videotapes of my, I'm walking down the yard with my hands behind my back and my chest out. I never do that. I was surprised to see that. But that is how, you know, the military officers, when they're reviewing the troops, that's the many politicians, it's a position of authority and power, which I abhor. I mean, I always work hard to minimize the power I have as a teacher.

18:40And here I was unconsciously assuming it. Now, Zimbardo is a situationist. I'm a situationist. Died in the wool. Individual variations in, quote, personality predict almost nothing about people in these situations. Meaning he firmly believes that people aren't necessarily good or bad, but that their behavior is strongly dependent on their situation, on the role they're expected to play. During the Stanford prison experiment, the situation was so intense that after just 36 hours, some prisoners began to break down. I mean, Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside. Don't you know? I can't see now. I've f***ed up.

19:27I don't know how to explain it. I'm f***ed up inside. I'm out! I'm out now! Instead of lasting two weeks, the experiment was canceled after six days. The way the study ended was I had invited young faculty members and graduate students who knew nothing about this study to come down and interview all the prisoners, guards, and staff. And Christina Maslach, who had been my graduate student, who we had just started dating, comes down the night before and sees the guards abusing the prisoners. And I look up, it's a 10 o 'clock toilet run, 10 o 'clock at night, last time prisoners go to the toilet.

20:01And prisoners have bags over their head, legs chained together, yelling, screaming, cursing. And I say, hey, Christina, look at that. Isn't that interesting? And she starts crying and runs out. We have this big argument. And I'm saying, what kind of psychologist are you? This is a crucible of human nature. She says, wait a minute. how could you see what I see and not see it as dehumanization? I thought I knew who you were. I don't know who you are. I didn't know who this person is. And I'm not sure I want to continue my relationship with you if this is the real you. How long had you been dating by this point?

20:31Oh, probably six months. And when she said it, was it kind of a light bulb moment for you or did you fight against the impulse? No, I fought against the impulse because at some deep level, I knew she was right. I didn't want to believe that I was chained by the situation. I mean, I'm a grownup. I've done lots of research. And not only are you a grownup, but you are the administrator of this thing. And it's amazing to me. I mean, now, 40 some years later, you can talk about it with the perspective of someone who was a participant and who understands what happened to you. But did you have any sense that what was happening to you was happening to you at the time?

21:04Oh, not at all. No, I'm saying it was not a light bulb. It was a lightning bolt that when she said it, we both talked about it. We subsequently got married the next year because I realized she was my heroine who saved me because the study was going to go another full week. And I'm not sure what would have happened at that point, but it was a lightning bolt. And of course, I resisted at first because what it means is I had made this mistake. I should have ended it days earlier. And essentially, it's what administrators do. I didn't do anything wrong, but I allowed wrongdoing to go on. And actually, one of the worst guards said in a later interview, the professor never said I couldn't do it.

21:43And therefore, I did it.

21:49So does Sleep No More offer a better lesson in human behavior? To answer that question, I called my Freakonomics friend and co-author Steve Levitt. He's an economist at the University of Chicago and host of the podcast People I Mostly Admire. Over the course of his academic career, Levitt has run and observed a lot of experiments, both in the lab and in the field. Hey, let me ask you this, Levitt. I'm sure you're familiar with the famous Stanford prison experiment, Philip Zimbardo, yes? Sure. So what do you think that says about anonymity or the power that a circumstance, a place being put in a place and playing a role, the power that that has on us?

22:33You know, I actually never, that's one result I don't believe. I just fundamentally don't believe that if you take undergrads and you put them into the role of the prisoner versus the prison guard, it's just, you know, I've never tried it, but I just don't believe that it's real. and I think to get it, you have to manipulate other things. It just doesn't seem right to me that people are like that. Now, maybe that's what's so amazing about it is that it really happens. And there was, I don't know if you were with me by the time, I was talking to a movie, a director from the BBC and he said that he had tried to recreate that for the BBC and it got so ugly so quickly that he had to cancel the whole thing and they didn't even do the show.