zimbardo.socialpsychology.orgPhilip G. Zimbardo

Social Psychology Network Maintained by Scott Plous , Wesleyan University Maps Profiled Experts Graduate Programs Research Groups Forums Overview of Forums SPN on Facebook Listserv Message Center Job Posting Forum Student ForumAdd-a-Link Page Directories Professional Profiles Social Media Directory Membership Directory Search All Links Books Journals Articles Software Courses People Organizations AdvancedPartner Sites Understanding Prejudice eInterview Action Teaching Research Randomizer Stanford Prison Experiment The Jigsaw Classroom Psychology News Center Social Psychology Pages Social Psychology Topics Professional Journals Teaching Resources Psychology Textbooks Online Psychology Studies Other Psychology Pages Links by Psychology Area Organizations & Conferences Psychology Career Center Ph.D. Program Rankings Clinical Psychology Programs Distance Learning and MOOCs Blogs, Podcasts, and RSS About the Network History and Mission Join or Donate to SPN Institutional Contributors Individual SPN Members Endorsements of the Network Site Usage Statistics SPN User Policy See Your Live Member PageOverview Research Publications Teaching Files Contact Home Page Web Site Wikipedia Biography Institution Stanford University Current Position Emeritus Professor (also Professor at Palo Alto University) Highest Degree Ph.D. in Psychology from Yale University, 1959 Blog Hero: The Best in Human Nature Online Media ResearchGate Profile Website YouTube Channel/Playlist @philzimbardo FORMERLY CHAIR OF THE COUNCIL OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY PRESIDENTS (CSSP), REPRESENTING MORE THAN 60 SCIENCE, MATH, AND EDUCATION SOCIETIES WITH 1.5 MILLION MEMBERS. PRISONS: My most notable study was the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which was a classic demonstration of the power of social situations to distort personal identities and long cherished values and morality as students internalized situated identities in their roles as prisoners and guards. The details of that research are presented in the Stanford Prison Experiment web site at www.PrisonExp.org . Our prize-winning DVD of the experiment, "Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment," is widely used in classrooms, civic groups and to train new guards at that infamous prison. Also see www.LuciferEffect.com , which discusses issues raised in my 2007 book "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" (Random House, 2008 paperback), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the William James Book Award for best psychology book in 2007. TIME: My current research on the psychology of time perspective focuses on the ways in which individuals develop temporal orientations that parcel the flow of personal experience into the mental categories, or time zones, of Past, Present, and Future, and also a Transcendental Future (beliefs about a future life after one’s death). I am interested especially in temporal biases in which these learned cognitive categories are not "balanced" according to situations, contexts and demands, but one or another are utilized excessively or underutilized. My book (with John Boyd) is The Time Paradox (Simon & Schuster, 2008) and its features can be gleaned from our new web site: www.theTimeParadox.com . Although I am primarily known as a "situationist," the time perspective research utilizes one of the best individual difference measures available, The Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). It is presented, along with scoring rules, on the web site. Researchers can use it free with my permission and agreement to share results. There are nearly 24 different translations of the ZTPI around the world, with many researchers finding significant effects relating TP scale scores to a host of outcome measures. Before starting a translation, please contact my French colleague who can inform you of existing scales in each language: Dr.Nicolas Fieulaine of Lyon (Nicolas.Fieulaine@univ-lyon2.fr). SHYNESS: My interest in the social and personal dynamics of shyness in adults (and later in children) emerged curiously from reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment, when considering the mentality of the Guard (restricting freedoms) and Prisoner (resisting, but ultimately accepting those restrictions on personal freedom) as dualities in each of us, and notably in the neurotic person and the shy individual. Since 1972, our research team, composed mostly of Stanford undergraduates, and graduates, Paul Pilkonis and Susan Brodt, has done pioneering research on the causes, correlates, and consequences of shyness in adults and children, using a multi-method, multi-response approach. Our findings of the extent of shyness and its many negative consequences led us to experiment with a shyness clinic where we tested various interventions among students and staff at Stanford University and then in the local community. Now our shyness clinic is housed in the clinic setting of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto, where it is both a treatment and research center. See www.shyness.com . MADNESS: I have been intrigued by the question of how people who are functioning normally and effectively first begin to develop the symptoms of psychopathology, that may eventually lead to psychiatric diagnosis, but in a general sense are termed as "madness." Utilizing a paradigm of experimental psychopathology, we have focused on the central role of personally experienced significant "discontinuities" as triggering a search for understanding (to be rational) and/or a search for social comparison with comparable others (to be normal). Those mental and situational searches are constrained by the operation of various biases that focus the search narrowly in specific domains and thus predispose to finding or confining what one is looking for, rather than to be the objective, global, unbiased search of the scientific mind. This research is currently on hold. VIOLENCE/EVIL: My interest in understanding the dynamics of human aggression and violence stems from early personal experiences growing up amid the violence of the South Bronx ghetto where I was born and raised. I have specifically focused however, on how "good" people are seduced or induced to engage in violent, or "evil" deeds by situational forces in which they find themselves surrounded, and psychological justifications and interpretations. I first developed a model of deindividuation that specified a set of input and output variables that predicted the triggering and consequences of this temporary state of suspended personal identity. Experimental and field research (on vandalism and graffiti) have generally supported this model. This research has broadened to include the psychology of terrorism. I am a a professor in the Department of Homeland Security Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. I am also Director of a new center on terrorism, the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism, along with Dr. James Breckenridge of PGSP as Associate Director. PERSUASION: My graduate school training in the Yale Attitude Change Program, headed by my mentor, Carl Hovland, peaked a long sustained interest in the processes of attitude and behavior change produced by persuasion. In addition to a series of early experiments on variables involved in the persuasion-attitude change relationship, I broadened this interest into the global category of Mind Control. I conceive of mind control as a phenomena encompassing all the ways in which personal, social and institutional forces are exerted to induce compliance, conformity, belief, attitude, and value change in others. After working personally with several members of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult, who had escaped the suicide/massacre in the Guyana jungle in 1978, I became fascinated with the uniquely intense psychological context and forces involved in cult recruitment, identification, and internalizationand how they could be resisted. DISSONANCE: From the time my Yale mentors, Bob...