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Promises can be made about almost anything. From promising to be a knight of God, to promising to talk about sex... to promising to stay together until death do us part. In this show, eight different promises are made. Some are kept, many are broken. But every broken, these promises changed something. Because even a failed promise has the power to change the world.

Host: Nina Foushee

Producers: Nina Foushee, Hadley Reid, Christy Hartman

Featuring: Nina Foushee, Will Hamilton, Liz Matus, Professor Jorah Dannenberg, Hadley Reid, Don Reid, Holly Russell, and Matt Rothe

Music used during transitions: Chris Zabriskie, Kevin Macleod, A Smile For Timbuctu, The Kyoto Connection

photo via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/23733274@N06/14178850322/

In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of Jordan Hall, the psychology building at Stanford. Mentally healthy college students were randomly assigned the roles of prisoner and guard. Dr. Zimbardo was trying to test how situations control human behavior, but within days, the situation spun out of control.

In this special episode, Drs. Philip Zimbardo and Christina Maslach tell the story of what ended up being one of the most infamous psychology studies in history - where young, mentally healthy participants turned brutal and desperate in only a few days. You'll learn surprising details of what inspired the Stanford Prison Experiment and how it ended, and hear how the experiment helped contribute to understanding the relationship between individuals and the situations they find themselves in.

Note: The original version of this episode mis-identified the location of the pilot study that inspired the Prison Experiment. The Stanford Storytelling Project regrets this error.

Featuring: Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Dr. Christina Maslach

Host: Bojan Srbinovski

Produced by: Rachel Hamburg, Bojan Srbinovski, Mischa Shoni, Charlie Mintz

Interviews conducted by: Bojan Srbinovski, Natacha Ruck, Victoria Hurst

Additional production help from:Justine Beed, Kate Nelson, Will Rogers

Original Music by Rob Voigt

Other music: Chris Zabriskie, Billy Gomberg, Gillicuddy, Tearpalm

Audio clips of the Stanford and Toyon Prison Experiments are from The Philip G. Zimbardo Papers at the Stanford University Archives.

News clip credit:

http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/april-30-2004-abu-ghraib-prison-scandal-9120643

Photo credit: Chuck Painter

Today, we generate data with every mouse click, phone call, and even every breath. This week on State of the Human, you'll hear about how an 18th century historian, a poet, a computer scientist, a composer, and a mysterious future being are all trying to interpret that data to understand something about the human experience. We're asking: what do we learn from seeing ourselves as data? And what is lost in translation?

Host: Kate Nelson

Producers: Rachel Hamburg, Miles S, Charlie Mintz, Kate Nelson, Rosie La Puma

Featuring:

Dr. Daniel Rosenberg, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jonathan Berger, Raven Jiang, Alec Glassford

Music used during transitions: Aboombong (Drag Along Behind), Chuzausen, Koona (Starkey), Kai Engel

Story 1: Straws on the River of Time

Description: Joseph Priestley was an 18th Renaissance man who helped discover oxygen. But he also invented something: the Chart of Biography. Here’s why he shouldn’t get too much credit for doing either of those things. It’s a story about one of the first times that people were turned into data.

Producers: Jess Peterson and Charlie Mintz

Featuring: Dr. Dan Rosenberg

Music: Jared C Balogh, Ergo Phizmiz, Dexter Britain, and Circus Marcus.

Story 2: Exposed

Description: Kyle is on a mission to scrape every last piece of his data off the internet. He’s devoted to navigating cyberspace without leaving a trace - but privacy has a cost.

Producers: Niuniu Teo and Charlie Mintz

Featuring: Haha, like we’d tell you

Music: Rod Hamilton (Bird); Pork Secret (Cool Crocs); Podington Bear (Operatives, Clouds Pass Softly); Marcel Pequel (Seven)

Story 3: The Stories that Feed Us

Description: Naomi Shihab Nye is a novelist, songwriter, and wandering poet. She tells a story about staring at people on planes, and how googling strangers can lead to a bigger life.

Producers: Justine Beed, Jack Dewey, and Will Rogers

Featuring: Naomi Shihab Nye

Music: Podington Bear

Story 4: Breathing Data

Link to Image: composition

Description: Jonathan Berger, a composer, teams up with a radiologist who needs to figure out a way to help calm anxious patients. His solution - have patients listen to their own data.

Producer: Kate Nelson

Featuring: Dr. Jonathan Berger

Music: Advent Chamber Orchestra, SJ Mellia, deef, Plurabelle, ZOE.LEELA, Gustav Landin

Sounds?: Coffee Shop, Deep Breath

Story 5: A Single Lifetime

Description: A new consciousness has just emerged - a product of all data and the interactions between it. That consciousness exists as a detached force, until falling in love teaches it to be human.

Producer: Alec Glassford and Rachel Hamburg

Featuring: Alec Glassford, Raven Jiang

Music: YACHT (Ring the Bell (Instrumental), The Afterlife), Podington Bear (Rythn), The Shivers (Kisses, Only Mine)

Sometimes you’re in your own country, your own home, and you know in your bones you don’t belong. That feeling pushes you to change something. This week we bring you four stories of people who don’t quite belong in the world where they live, and who take matters in their own hands to construct their own belonging. A very young girl finds a sense of belonging while running away from an angry mob. A student creates a bridge between the Jewish and Irish sides of her family. Seven gender-defying divas share what it means to belong to yourself. And a young man discovers how to prove you belong, when the numbers are against you.

Host: Leslie Nguyen-Okwu

Producers: Will Rogers and Natacha Ruck

Featuring: Justine Beed, Carla Lewis, Eileen Williams, Josh Hoyt, Winona Azure, Raya Light, Macy Rodman, Peaches Christ, Alexis Blair Penney, Heklina, Sissy Spastik, Mathu Andersen, and Cher Noble.

photo via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ganesha_isis/4439563089

Music used during transitions: Welcome Wizard, Monk Turner, Johnny Ripper, Zachary Cale, Mighty Moon, & Ethan Schmid, Blue Ducks

Humans aren’t the fastest or strongest animal, but we do make the best tools. From plows to pacemakers, we’ve always used technology to transcend our human limits. This week, we ask how far that project can go. We’ll tell you how the first farmers in history transcended the limits of meat and muscle, only to create a very different kind of boundary. And we’ll present the story of two scientists excited to leave their human skin behind. Also, the story of a man who cannot walk, but who can fly; why PCs can be our friends; and finally, robot phenomenology.

Host: Mischa Shoni

Producers: Charlie Mintz, Rachel Hamburg

Featuring: Ian Morris, Byron Reeves, BJ Fogg, Edward Maibach, Shyam Sundar, Laurie Mason, Henry Evans, Jackson Roach

Music used during transitions: Fabrizio Paterlini (Veloma); Gillicuddy (Porthlaze Glove); Podington Bear (Delphi); Latché Swing (Hungaria)

image via flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1080p/2421386153

For more information, visit storytelling.stanford.edu

Intro Story: Feeding Back Into Us

After the last ice age, we humans moved from hunting and gathering to farming. With the plow, farming became a whole lot easier -- but there was a dark side too.

Producer: Charlie Mintz, Bojan Srbinovski

Featuring: Ian Morris

Music: Broke For Free (Night Owl, The Gold Lining, Only Knows); Wilted Woman (Turing); Podington Bear (Dole It Out,); Black Hoods (Talking Cure)

Story 1: Robots Are My Freedom

As an adult, Henry Evans suffered a medical trauma that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Then the second half of his life began.

Producers: Eileen Williams, Miles S.

Featuring: Henry Evans

Links: Robots For Humanity

Music: Broke For Free (My Always Mood,One And, Budding); Audionautix (Atlantis)

Story 2: With 18 Arms And Compound Eyes

A scientist visits a relative in the hospital and finds the best available cures lacking. He and a partner go to work at the next frontier of medicine. They wind up bumping into the question of what makes us human.

Producer: Jack Dewey, Rachel Hamburg

Featuring: Xander Honkala, Andre Watson

Links: Ligandal

Music: Podington Bear Christian Bjoerklund Rolemusic

Story 3: Sympathy For The Dell

This story is a tribute to the late Stanford professor Clifford Nass. Friends and colleagues described him as one of the most human humans you could ever meet. He discovered ways that computers can be human too, and one consequence of that research is coming to a hospital near you.

Producers: Charlie Mintz, Josh Hoyt

Featuring: Clifford Nass, Byron Reeves, BJ Fogg, Laurie Mason, Edward Maibach, Shyam Sundar, Chris Corio

Link: Engineered Care

Music: Podington Bear (Lake Victoria, Formless) Broke For Free (Note Drop, Like Swimming, Luminous, Blown Out, One And); memotone (This Is The Room, Fractal, Sleeping With the Insects) ; 2ndMOUSE (Arc Reactor); Audionautix (Namaste)

Story 4: The Simulation Deck

A radio play about the strawberry-sized gap between humans and machines.

Producer: Jackson Roach

Featuring: Andrew Brassel, Matthew Libby.

Links: Robot voice created by Cepstral Voices.

When we joke with our friends, our coworkers and our family, it’s not just about hearing them laugh. More often than not we’re looking for something beyond laughter. We’re after acceptance, bonding, release, shaming… and sometimes even more. This week on State of the Human we’re investigating how people use joking to create new realities for themselves and the people around them.

We have six stories, exploring the way jokes, pranks, and even puns can change our lives. We’ll hear stories from stand up comedian Tig Notaro and humor theorist Marvin Diogenes, and we’ll travel from Stanford’s cafeterias to the presidential suite on Air Force One. We’ll hear stories about how jokes can help us and synchronize our minds, stare cancer in the face and make us question our humanity along with everything we take for granted. And also, we'll laugh a lot.

Producers: Natacha Ruck and Nina Foushee

Featuring: Rosie La Puma, Jackson Roach, Nina Foushee, Miles S., Justine Beed, Charlie Mintz, Ken Grobe, Lora Kelley, Marvin Diogenes, David Demarest, Sam Roach, Jay Roach, the La Puma family, Claire Slattery, Nathaniel Nelson, Reggie Watts, and Tig Notaro.

Almost 100 years ago, a rogue geologist named Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift. It didn't matter that he was right. He was laughed off the stage. And even though he spent the rest of his career proving his theory, he died unknown. But eventually the theory of continental drift was accepted. Talk about resilience. That's our theme this week and we have five stories of people discovering resilience and how to become resilient. In Wegenerʼs day, people thought character was like the continents, fixed. Either you were a resilient person or you werenʼt. Today we know we can cultivate resilience. We can all become Wegeners.

Producer: Jonah Willihnganz

Featuring: Jessica Talbert, Jordan Raymond, Michelle Powers, Adina Glickman, Michael Zeligs, Jane Reynolds

More info at: http://web.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/245-episode-401-resilience.html

Since the days of Narcissus and the looking pool, we've known there's a danger in seeing ourselves. There's a possibility of caring too much, or seeing something we don't want to see. But that hasn't stopped humans from trying to see more and more. Today we have more ways to see ourselves than ever before. So it's time to take a look at looking. What do we want to see, and what do we do with that information? Today on our show, four stories of people who tried to see themselves clearly. A woman views her genetic profile, and learns why her tendency towards depression might be an asset. A true mirror--one that doesn't reverse your image--is deployed on Stanford students. A personality test called the Meyers Briggs profile is taken to the max. And a girl explains her point system that lets her keep track of exactly how people feel about her.

Producer: Jonah Willihnganz

Host: Xandra Clark

Featuring: Daniel Steinbock, Lone Frank, Colleen Caleshu, Hank Greely, John Nantz, Rachel Hamburg, Xandra Clark, Iris Clayter, Christy Hartman, and Alexzandra Scully

More info at: http://web.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/263-episode-402-seeing-ourselves.html

This week on our show, four stories of giving. First, it's a story about a charity fundraiser, and the woman who comes to question why fundraisers even exist. Then it's the story of a t-shirt entrepreneur's attempt to send one million shirts to Africa. Third, it's two interviews with people who had to decide if they were willing to donate bone marrow. Last, the story of Odyssey Works, a group of artists that create works of art for a single person.

Producer: Charlie Mintz

Featuring: Rachel Hamburg, Will Rogers, Jason Sadler, Saundra Schimmelpfennig, TMS Ruge, Nick Hartley, Mandeep Gill, Kristina Kulin, Abraham Burickson, and Jen Harmon

More info at: http://web.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/265-episode-403-how-to-give.html

When asked what trait they want to instill in their children, most parents answer “honesty.” But in truth, learning to lie is a crucial part of childhood. This week, we take a deep look at how and why we learn to lie, and what lying does to you. Our first story investigates the most common lie of the western world and how it ushers us into the world of lies. Our second story is about the irrepressible urge to tell the truth, and our third and final story is about lying as a form of love.

Producer: Natacha Ruck

Featuring: Joshua Hoyt, Victoria Hurst, Poncie Rutsch, Christy Hartman, Dana Kletter, Dr. Gail Heyman, Dr. Karl Rosengren, Anish Mitra, Ian Girard, Rebekah Morreale, and Ashley Artmann.

More info at: http://web.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/301-episode-405-lying.html