Islanders or inmates

savannahdarby6
Sep 19
4 min read

Love Island Through the Lens of the Stanford Prison Experiment

By: Savannah Darby

Summer is coming to an end, and so is the viral reality TV show we all love to hate: Love Island USA.

If you’ve never watched Love Island, where the hell have you been? It actually started in the UK back in 2015 as a pretty low-key reality dating show, that is, until the US version exploded in popularity after last year's viral season.

The rules are pretty basic, or so it seems. Eligible singles live together on a remote island in Fiji for six weeks. They couple up, compete in some freaky challenges, cook a lot of avocado toast, and vie for America’s affections until one lucky couple wins the grand prize of $100,000… oh, and a happy relationship, of course!

Love Island USA has dominated the pop culture scene, leaving a lot of pressure for this season to deliver. Whether it delivered drama or psychological damage, however, is still undetermined.

While it's advertised as all fun and games, Love Island harbors some much deeper psychological undertones. With the rising popularity of similar reality TV shows, it raises questions about the state of our society and why we gravitate towards this form of entertainment.

Let's start with what goes on off-camera. The islanders are forced to follow certain rules that may sound harmless, but are actually strategically used by producers to create certain content and outcomes (aka to stir up drama).

There are no clocks in the villa, and contestants have no access to any methods of keeping track of the date or time aside from the pre-determined waking/sleeping hours chosen by producers.

The iconic monogrammed water bottles may appear cute on the surface, but they actually serve as another way to ensure producers get the edit they want. Since the water bottles are opaque, you can’t use the water levels as markers of scene continuity like you could if they were clear.

There is a ban on music, visible brand logos, and general contact with the outside world. The phones you see the islanders snapping pics with on TV are specially made by production to only have photo and message receiving capabilities, while their personal phones are kept away until they leave the island.

You might think it's just to avoid copyright laws, but it also ensures that the islanders are completely immersed in their new environment without any ties to life outside the villa.

The Love Island villa is marketed as an island sanctuary, but what they don’t tell you is that it’s carefully designed to promote close contact and easy camera angles. It is almost entirely open-air with few doors, so there is nowhere to really hide from cameras (yes, there’s even cameras in the bathroom…).

The common areas are circular, so everybody is in view and encouraged to interact with each other. Production also has very little contact with the islanders, even in off-camera moments. Islanders are given what they need via hidden doors built into the villa, so that when filming, which they do almost continuously via many hidden cameras, they avoid having “outsiders” on the set as much as possible.

So, we have a strategically built environment, designed to isolate participants and put them under a constant state of surveillance where they are being observed by those on the outside. This sounds all too similar to a controversial psychological experiment that took place in the 1970s: Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Stanford Prison experiment was set up to test how isolation and assigned roles impact people’s behaviors. College boys were assigned to either guard or prisoner, and kept in a simulated prison built by Zimbardo in Stanford’s basement, all while being secretly observed and recorded.

Basically, Zimbardo walked so Love Island producers could run.

Naturally, the results showed that the isolated environment prompted more aggressive behaviors, which were inconsistent with how one would normally behave.

Socially, both guards and prisoners adopted power dynamics based on their assigned roles, despite these roles being random and artificial. There was violence and psychological damage toward these participants, and this experiment remains one of the most controversial yet famous in the field of psychology.

This research was originally conducted for the military in the 1970s, and yet it’s all too similar to a pop culture dating show phenomenon from the 2000s. Why is that?

A simple answer: social psychology.

Reality TV shows, as we saw earlier, are specifically designed to incite certain content through the behavior of their contestants. Human behavior follows similar trends across the board; whether you’re a Stanford college student in the 1970s or an eligible young single in 2025, isolation and social hierarchies have a profound impact.

Our environment influences our behavior, and in both cases, drives people to act more drastically. Participants act according to the roles they are assigned within the artificial environment, rather than being truly spontaneous and themselves. Reality shows continue to thrive on these demand characteristics because they produce the drama that viewers seek.

But why do we seek out this drama? Studies show that the obsession with Love Island and other similar reality TV shows is due to the escape they offer from the monotony of daily life. It can even go so far as activating dopamine receptors, which house the reward/pleasure centers of the brain.

It’s important to always consider the morals behind the media we consume, and to be mindful of how easy it is to forget that these are real people, not just characters on a screen or in a big experiment.

We all enjoy consuming reality TV, but make sure it doesn’t consume you.

Savannah Darby is a Sophomore majoring in Health Science and Visual Art. She is Rowdy’s resident Love Doctor (only partially self-proclaimed) and a loyal Love Island apologist- Nicolandria for life! When she’s not writing, she’s probably on a research spiral or a coffee run… or both. Most importantly, she is so excited for this upcoming issue of Rowdy, so stay tuned!