Philip George Zimbardo

Philip George Zimbardo (born March 23, 1933) is an American psychologist who gained his popularity as a coordinator of Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 in which 24 students were divided into two groups, prisoners and prison guards. Due to the increasing violence of the wardens the experiment was shut after only six days. He studies the power of social situations to distort personal identities to present day, trying to understand what makes people commit evil acts. He provides the summary of this problem in his book Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. His other research topics are social and personal dynamics of shyness, madness, time, hypnosis, persuasion and dissonance. He gave a series of TED talks, had a popular TV show called Discovering Psychology and among others he founded a Heroic Imagination Project, an organization which tries to inspire ordinary people to act as heroes and agents of social change. He wrote more than 300 publications.

Biography

Zimbardo was born in New York City on March 23,1933. He grew up in South Bronx in a poor family of Sicilian immigrants. He got his BA in psychology, sociology and anthropology at Brooklyn College in 1954. Then he got his MA (1955) and his Ph.D. (1959) from psychology at Yale University, where he continued to teach. After a short period of time he became a professor at New York University where he was teaching until 1967. He spent the following year teaching at Colombia University and then in 1968 he became a professor at Stanford University where he remained until he retired in 2008 after. In 2002 he was elected as a President of American Psychological Organization. In 2005 he was awarded with the Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime research on the human condition. He is married to Christina Maslach, a psychologist who was the first person to describe an occupational burnout, she also initiated the stoping of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Together they have two daughters.

Lucifer Effect

The Lucifer Effect takes its name after Lucifer who used to be God’s favorite angel but then he questioned God’s authority and therefore was cast in Hell. This transformation from Lucifer (meaning “Light”) to Satan helps Zimbardo to show how easily good people turn evil. In his book he analyzes the pictures of the extreme abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison. He was a witness expert at trial of Ivan ,,Chip” Frederick who was one of the guards. The statement of US government concerning these war crimes was that the US Army had ,,bad apples”, Zimbardo in contrast argues that they had “bad barrels”, meaning that the transformation of their character was not dispositional (inside the individual), but situational (external) and systemic (broad influences such as political, economical or legal powers). According to Zimbardo there are 7 social processes that might result in the adaptation of evil: mindlessly taking the first small step, dehumanization of others, de-individuation of self which leads to anonymity, diffusion of personal responsibility, blind obedience to authority, uncritical conformity to group norms and passive tolerance of the evil through inactivity or indifference. All these processes can easily take place in new or unfamiliar situations. Besides the situations intentionally created by scientists Stanford Prison Experiment, evil committed by the Nazis, Milgram’s Experiment, massacre in Rwanda, the rape of Nanking or the Abu Ghraib Prison. The guards of the Abu Ghraib worked 12 hours per day, seven days a week for forty days, they slept in prison cell when they were off duty, the whole place was dirty and moulded and the prisoners attacked guards on regular basis. This was an extreme setting in which de-individuation took a place, system was guilty. Zimbardo calls for a paradigm shift from the medical model which focuses only on the individual (the bad apple) to the public health model which recognizes systemic and situational vectors as a disease (ex. violence, bullying).

The Banality of Heroism

The concept of Banality of Heroism refers to Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil. The basic idea is that every person can become a hero. Zimbardo’s organization Heroic Imagination Project gives courses on heroic imagination and hero talents in order to make people think of themselves as a “heroes-in-waiting”. He argues that children do not have any vital hero models - they have either traditional societal heroes like Nelson Mandela or Ghandi who organize their lives around sacrifice for a cause, or typical children heroes like Superman or Wonder Woman who cannot become reality models because they posses superpowers. Zimbardo stresses a need to teach children that most heroes are everyday people who emerge as heroes only in particular situation, for example Joe Darby who published the photos from Abu Ghraib, or Wesley Autrey who saved a student who had suffered a seizure and fallen onto tracks in New York Subway in 2007. Zimbardo argues that heroism and evil are situational, because “the very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination, in those who are perpetrators of evil, can also inspire the heroic in others of us or render most people bystanders and guilty of the Evil of Inaction.” (Zimbardo, 2007)

Time

Zimbardo focuses on psychology of time in The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life which he wrote together with John Boyd, a time psychologist from Stanford University. Time perspective is used to study how individuals unconsciously divide the flow of human experience into different time zones or time frames. Time perspectives do not vary only between individuals but also between cultures, social classes or nations. Therefore the time frames are learned and biased towards some frames which are being over-used. As an example of different time perspectives Zimbardo presents Stanford Marshmallow Experiment conducted in 1972 by his colleague Walter Mischel. Four year old children were given one marshmallow and were told that if they could resist to eat it,they would be rewarded with two of them. Two thirds of the children yielded to temptation. After 14 years Mischel analyzed what was so special about this subset of children. He found that they scored 250 higher on SAT and they were generally better students with less trouble. According to Zimbardo these people are future oriented, their decisions are goal oriented and they are able to anticipate the consequences of their actions. In order to reach their goals they have to make sacrifices such as not spending much time with family or friends, they do not have hobbies or fun and they usually don’t have enough sleep. Future orientation gives them opportunity to soar new destinations and challenges. Present orientated people focus on immediate sensory present with minimal consideration of past or future context and consequences. There are two types of present oriented persons: hedonists who enjoy their life and “seize the moment” and fatalists who feel like they have no choices and everything had been already planned for them by fate or some structural, political or ideological force, therefore they tend to be passive. Past oriented people focus either on negative or positive past experience. They generally tend to be conservative and value the family. It is the least common type. In order to measure the time orientation he constructed Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI), which consists of 61 questions.

See Also

• Stanford Prison Experiment
• Broken Windows Theory

Selected Works

• Gerrig, R., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2010). Psychology and life (19th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (1972). The Stanford Prison Experiment a Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment. Philip G. Zimbardo, Inc.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (1977/1991). Shyness: What it is, what to do about it. Reading, MA: Perseus Press.
• Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.
• Zimbardo,P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (2008). The Time Paradox. New York: Free Press, Simon & Schuster.

References

1. Zimbardo, P. (2013). Philip G. Zimbardo: Professional Profile. Retrieved from: http://zimbardo.socialpsychology.org/
2. Zimbardo, P. (2013). Professor emeritus of psychology, Stanford University. (2011) Retrieved from: http://www.zimbardo.com
3. Zimbardo, P. (2013). The Lucifer Effect. (2013). Retrieved from: http://www.lucifereffect.com/aboutphil_bio.htm
4. Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House.
5. Zimbardo, P. Heroic Imagination Project. Retrieved from: http://heroicimagination.org
6. Zimbardo, P., & Franco, Z.. (2007). The Banality of Heroism. The Greater Good: The Science of Meaningful Life [online]. Retrieved from: http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_banality_of_heroism
7. Zimbardo,P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (2008). The Time Paradox. New York: Free Press, Simon & Schuster.
8. Zimbardo, P. (2012). Time Paradox: The New Psychology That Will Change Your Life. Retrieved from: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/; more on types can be found here: http://www.thetimeparadox.com/2008/08/03/an-overview-of-time-perspective-types/

Media

• TED Talks:
  • The Psychology of Evil. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html
  • The Psychology of Time. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html
  • The Demise of Guys. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html