A Surreal Situation (Continued)

Most of the participants applied and stayed in for the money. Willing to prove the force of the situation, Zimbardo has constantly downplayed the personal factors in the Stanford Prison Experiment. He collected little personal information about the participants and did not care to exploit these data. In the person versus situation debate that polarized US psychology in the late 1960s, Zimbardo became a strong promoter of the situation thesis.