The Study

The Guards retreat to their mess after the conflict. They are bitter and angry with each other. Some are furious that the Prisoners were able to humiliate them and get away with it. They also realize that this will only have increased the confidence of the Prisoners:

gTA: Today’s only Day 4. Now once, after, they can see what’s
          happened today, and they can, now they know they can
          do whatever they want.
gBG: No, that’s wrong.
gTA: Yes!… They can do whatever they want and there’s nothing
          we can do about it. Now if we, for a minute, think we have to
          endure this for the next 10 days then we have to seriously
          consider changing the way we work.
gTQ: We won’t, we won’t.

Even in adversity, the Guards cannot unite. They are in a spiral of internal conflict and each failure drives them further apart.

They become more and more distrustful, more concerned with watching each other than watching the Prisoners. The harder they work, the more they cancel each other out.