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David Adam, London
Final proof that scientists can work with the
media, or an unfortunate clash of peer pres-
sure and peer review? Television viewers in
Britain can make up their own minds this
week when a unique combination of science
and reality TV gets its first screening.

Billed as both entertainment and serious
research, the BBC programme The Experi-
ment attempts to recreate aspects of a 1971
psychology study by Stanford University
researcher Philip Zimbardo. In the original
study, volunteers were asked to assume the
role of either prisoner or prison guard, and
were placed together in a simulated jail. Those
acting as guards were so brutal to the prisoners
that a shocked Zimbardo abandoned the
experiment and said that it should never be
repeated. It is now seen as an important
demonstration of how social circumstances
can make people conform to particular roles. 

But whereas the Stanford guards bullied
the prisoners and forced them to clean toilets
with their bare hands, their British counter-
parts tried to befriend the prisoners and even
agreed to reorganize the prison as a com-
mune. An edited version of the 10-day trial,
held last December at a London television 
studio, will be shown in four one-hour 
programmes beginning this week.

“This has been a ground-breaking collab-
oration between academia and the media,”
says Alex Haslam, a psychologist at Exeter
University who planned the experiment with
Steve Reicher, a researcher at the University 
of St Andrews and joint editor of the British
Journal of Social Psychology. “It is not a media
creation on which psychologists were invited
to comment. The guiding principle for us 
and the BBC was always the science.”

Others warn, however, that it is difficult to
compare the two studies directly, as behav-
ioural trials are hard to replicate. The tele-
vision cameras will also have had “an immedi-
ate constraint on what people do”, says 
Donald Laming, a psychologist at the Univer-
sity of Cambridge. Zimbardo, still at Stanford
University, could not be reached for comment.

For The Experiment, 15 male volunteers
were recruited through newspaper adverts,
and divided into 6 guards and 9 prisoners. The
prisoners shared cramped cells and carried
out chores, whereas the guards enjoyed better
food and separate rooms and were given lim-
ited powers over their charges. As well as
observing and recording the behaviour of the
volunteers, Haslam and Reicher asked them
to complete psychometric tests and analysed
their saliva for the stress hormone cortisol.

It soon became clear that the guards were

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NATURE | VOL 417 | 16 MAY 2002 | www.nature.com 213

unable to organize themselves. “There was a
lack of a common social identity, no leader-
ship and they didn’t even develop a simple
shift pattern,” says Reicher. The guards showed
more psychological stress than the prisoners.

Haslam says that he welcomed the chance
to challenge the Stanford results, and claims
that the guards who behaved as tyrants in the
original experiment did so only because they
were encouraged to. n

Reality TV show recreates famed social study

Broadcasting behind bars: The Experiment aims
to explore how people conform to set roles.

Jefferson’s descendants continue to deny slave link
Erika Check, Washington
Thomas Jefferson’s descendants have decided
that the ancestors of one of his slaves cannot
join their family club, despite DNA evidence
published in Nature suggesting that he
fathered at least one of her children. 

The Monticello Association, a group of
nearly 800 descendants of Jefferson’s
daughters, voted on 5 May to keep Sally
Hemings’s descendants out of their group.
This means that Hemings’s relatives cannot

be buried in the graveyard at Monticello,
Jefferson’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Their vote is the latest twist in a racially
charged controversy that has raged since
Jefferson’s own day, when it was noted that
Sally Hemings’s children bore a likeness to
the third president. That and other evidence
fuelled speculation that the author of the
Declaration of Independence fathered six
children by Hemings, who was a slave at
Monticello. She only became pregnant
during times when Jefferson stayed there. 

Jefferson’s descendants have always
disputed this speculation. Jefferson’s grand-
children claimed that one of his maternal
nephews, Samuel or Peter Carr, fathered
Hemings’s children. But genetic tests pub-
lished in November 1998 (see Nature 396,
27–28; 1998) eliminated that possibility. The
tests compared the Y chromosomes of men
descended from Sally Hemings’s son Eston
with those from the Jefferson and Carr
family lines. Eston’s Y chromosome was
found to be virtually identical to Jefferson’s
and dissimilar to the Carr chromosome. 

The study caused an outcry because it
was published in the midst of then-President
Bill Clinton’s impeachment process. Clinton’s

supporters seized on it as proof that previous
presidents — even the most celebrated ones
— had also engaged in sexual indiscretion. 

The findings prompted the Thomas
Jefferson Foundation, which owns and
operates Monticello, to investigate the
Hemings connection. In January 2000, it
concluded that the DNA study, combined
with other evidence, indicated a “high prob-
ability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston
Hemings, and that he most likely was the
father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children”.

But Jefferson’s descendants remain
unswayed, and now say that Thomas’s brother
Randolph was probably Eston’s father. “They
have not provided conclusive evidence that
Thomas Jefferson had a relationship with
Sally Hemings,” says Nathaniel Abeles, the
Monticello Association’s president. 

The association’s position cuts no ice
with the academic community. “This
decision is scientifically unsound, historically
unsound and morally bankrupt,” says
Annette Gordon-Reed of the New York Law
School. “The issue is pretty much settled
and the fact that the family association
chooses to tell a story about itself doesn’t
affect what scientists or historians think.” n

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Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, where
his slave’s descendants have been denied burial.

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	Jefferson’s descendants continue to deny slave link