Philip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo
Philip George Zimbardois a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment and has since authored various introductory psychology books, textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox and The Time Cure. He is also the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 March 1933
CountryUnited States of America
Philip Zimbardo quotes about
My first formal research, published in 1953, was on trying to understand the dynamics of prejudice, of interaction between blacks and Puerto Ricans.
What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group; in a romantic setting versus an educational one; when you are with close friends or in an anonymous crowd; or when you are traveling abroad as when at home base.
Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.
If you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation.
While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.
For years I've been interested in a fundamental question concerning what I call the psychology of evil: Why is it that good people do evil deeds? I've been interested in that question since I was a little kid. Growing up in the ghetto in the South Bronx, I had lots of friends who I thought were good kids, but for one reason or another they ended up in serious trouble. They went to jail, they took drugs, or they did terrible things to other people. My whole upbringing was focused on trying to understand what could have made them go wrong.
Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.
Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity. Too often we look to the stars through the thick lens of personal invulnerability when we should also look down to the slippery slope beneath our feet.
Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
I’ve always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask...
If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.