By that time, one-third of the guard population had shown genuine sadistic traits and many of the prisoners were emotionally traumatized. He did not stop the experiment until his girlfriend confronted him with the immorality of the situation.
The main researcher himself became so absorbed in his role as superintendent that officials had to deny his increasingly excessive requests. None of them even wanted to quit the experiment when they were offered the chance. Prisoners were subjected to regular humiliation and psychological torture, but strangely, they started to accept their treatment, even though they became increasingly stressed and troubled. When the prisoners started to rebel against the strict prison regime and the uncomfortable clothing, the guards started to display increasingly sadistic behavior in order to keep them subdued and maintain discipline. The reason was that the guards and prisoners got into character too deeply. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks but was discontinued after just six days.
The goal was to see if personality traits in prisoners and guards could lead to power abuse in prisons. The guards were only forbidden to physically harm the prisoners, but they were not given any other limitations in order to keep the peace. The main researcher participated in the simulation himself as the prison's superintendent. A group of test subjects was divided in two subsets, one assuming the role of prisoners and the other assuming the role of prison guards. The movie, and the book that inspired it, is loosely based on the real-life Stanford prison experiment conducted in 1971.
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