PHILIP ZIMBARDO QUOTES II

American psychologist (1933- )

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As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: morality

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While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: past

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I've been interested in terrorism since 9/11. I was president of the American Psychological Association right after 9/11 and got involved with New York City firefighters who were at the scene, and then got involved in trying to understand who becomes a terrorist. What are these people like? Are they mindless fanatics? In fact, clearly they're not. That's what we say whenever there's something we don't understand--we say it's mindless, senseless. I'm trying to understand what's in the minds and hearts of terrorists, and how do you combat it other than just finding a terrorist and destroying them?

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: terrorism

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The [Stanford Prison Experiment] was readily approved by the Human Subjects Research committee because it seemed like college kids playing cops and robbers, it was an experiment that anyone could quit at any time and minimal safeguards were in place. You must distinguish hind sight from fore sight, knowing what you know now after the study is quite different from what most people imagined might happen before the study began.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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Time is the backdrop of our lives and the very fabric of the cosmos.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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Part of what we want to do with the Heroic Imagination Project is to get kids to think about what it means to be a hero. The most basic concept of a hero is socially constructed: It differs from culture to culture and changes over time. Think of Christopher Columbus. Until recently, he was a hero. Now he’s a genocidal murderer! If he were alive today, he'd say, "What happened? I used to be a hero, and now people are throwing tomatoes at me!"

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: heroes

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There was zero time for reflection. We had to feed the prisoners three meals a day, deal with the prisoner breakdowns, deal with their parents, run a parole board. By the third day I was sleeping in my office. I had become the superintendent of the Stanford county jail. That was who I was: I'm not the researcher at all. Even my posture changes--when I walk through the prison yard, I'm walking with my hands behind my back, which I never in my life do, the way generals walk when they're inspecting troops.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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If you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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Where can you find purpose? Like success and happiness, our purpose exists in the present, and we constantly strive toward the future to maintain it. What it is for which we strive is up to each of us. The important thing is that we strive toward something.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: purpose

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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.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable--that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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In one sense, the Stanford prison study is more like a Greek drama than a traditional experiment, in that we have humanity, represented by a bunch of good people, pitted against an evil-producing situation. The question is, does the goodness of the people overwhelm the bad situation, or does the bad situation overwhelm the good people?

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

Tags: environment

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I've always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask. When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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Most of us fail to appreciate the extent to which our behavior is under situational control, because we prefer to believe that is all is internally generated. We wander around cloaked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and rationality.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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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.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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When you grow up in a privileged environment you want to take credit for the success you see all around, so you become a dispositionalist. You look for character, genes, or family legacy to explain things, because you want to say your father did good things, you did good things, and your kid will do good things. Curiously, if you grow up poor you tend to emphasize external situational factors when trying to understand unusual behavior. When you look around and you see that your father's not working, and you have friends who are selling drugs or their sisters in prostitution, you don't want to say it's because there's something inside them that makes them do it, because then there's a sense in which it's in your line. Psychologists and social scientists that focus on situations more often than not come from relatively poor, immigrant backgrounds. That's where I came from.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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The first time I spoke publicly about the Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram told me: "Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine."

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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What makes human behavior work? What determines human thought and action? What makes some of us lead moral, righteous lives, while others seem to slip easily into immorality and crime? Is what we think about human nature based on the assumption that inner determinants guide us up the good paths or down the bad ones? Do we give insufficient attention to the outer determinants of our thoughts, feelings, and actions? To what extent are we creatures of the situation, of the moment, of the mob? And is there anything that anyone has ever done that you are absolutely certain you could never be compelled to do?

PHILIP ZIMBARDO

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