Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update)
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Hey there, Stephen Dubner. We are in the middle of a new series on the economics of live theater, which got me thinking about another episode we made way back in 2012 about the psychology of one particularly fascinating piece of theater. Such a fascinating piece that it only closed finally in early 2025. The episode also gets into one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology. So I hope you enjoy this bonus episode.
As always, thanks for listening. Sometimes you see a piece of theater and it completely scrambles your brain. I remember I was at one of the first performances of Hare. 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 so essentially before the play began what they did is set up to say this is going to shock you this is going to be off your usual radar so don't come expecting you know traditional theater this is something new I still remember that was like 40 years ago we starve look again that was Philip Zimbardo is that name ringabelle 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.
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