Phil Zimbardo
Department of Psychology
Jordan Hall, Mail Code 2130
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305-2130
U.S.A.
Home Page
Phone: (650) 723-7498
Fax: (650) 725-5699
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CURRENTLY 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, which now explores links to the abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 which 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 co-founder of the National Center on the Psychology of Terrorism and a distinguished fellow in the Department of Homeland Security Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
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 internalization -- and how they could be resisted.
DISSONANCE: From the time my Yale mentors, Bob Cohen and Jack Brehm, introduced me to Leon Festinger's manuscript on the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance in 1957, I was excited by the scope of its domain starting with such a simple set of initial assumptions and principles, and leading to many non-obvious predictions. My dissertation pitted predictions from dissonance theory against the more rational expectations from Hovland and Sherif's judgment model of latitudes of acceptance and rejection-and dissonance won. Of all the research I have done, I am most proud of the set of studies conducted with my NYU graduate and undergraduate students that conceptualized dissonance phenomena as the cognitive control of motivation, and demonstrated the power of this approach in a series of experimentally rigorous studies that used classic research paradigms on classical and instrumental conditioning (learned from another of my Yale mentors, Neal Miller).
HYPNOSIS: I was trained in hypnosis at New York's Morton Prince Clinic for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and am reasonably good at self hypnosis. My primary interest in hypnosis has not been in this curious phenomena itself, but in using it as an experimental technique in my research arsenal to induce or modify emotions, moods, motivational states, and beliefs, that are assumed central mediators to demonstrating specific predicted relationships in a variety of other research domains, such as dissonance, time perspective, and unexplained arousal (discontinuity) research. I have been co-director, with Ernest Hilgard of his Stanford Hypnosis Research Laboratory and published with him a study on the remarkable stability over years of hypnotizability scores.
TEACHING: My love for classroom teaching spills over to wanting to understand ways to improve teaching effectiveness, for which I have turned to some field research that combined experimental designs with novel classroom practices. As a semi-retired professor, I teach half time for half salary, but was inspired to teach more intensively than ever before in creating a fabulous new course, "Exploring Human Nature," a large undergraduate lecture course with sections, experiential exercises and extraordinary guests and topics. Please see www.psych187.com
OTHER RESEARCH: In addition to these major categories of my research interests, I have recently gotten involved in the domain of political psychology, specifically the role of personality factors that personalize politics. This work has been done in conjunction with Gian Vittorio Caprara of the University of Rome, and has been published in Nature, J. Political Psychology, and recently in American Psychologist.
 Books:
 Gerrig, R., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2008). Psychology and life (18th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
- Huggins, M. K., Haritos-Fatouros, M., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2002). Violence workers: Police torturers and murderers reconstruct Brazilian atrocities. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1977/1991). Shyness: What it is, what to do about it. Reading, MA: Perseus Press. [Translated into Polish, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, German, French, Norwegian, and Finnish.]
- Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Ebbesen, E. B., & Maslach, C. (1977). Influencing attitudes and changing behavior (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Johnson, R. L.., & Weber, A. L. (2005). Psychology: Core concepts (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
- Zimbardo, P. G., & Leippe, M. (1991). The psychology of attitude change and social influence (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. [Hardcover edition published by Temple University Press (1991).]
- Zimbardo, P. G., & Radl, S. L. (1981/1999). The shy child: Overcoming and preventing shyness from infancy to adulthood. Reprinted Malor Books. Translated into Chinese, 1994. Yuan-Liou Publishing Co., Ltd. [Also translated into Italian and Spanish.]
Journal Articles:
- Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1998). The past and future of U.S. prison policy: Twenty-five years after the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 53, 709-727.
- Piccione, C., Hilgard, E. R., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1989). On the degree of stability of measured hypnotizability over a 25-year period. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 289-295.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Andersen, S. M., & Kabat, L. G. (1981, 26 June). Induced hearing deficit generates experimental paranoia. Science, 212, 1529-1531.
Other Publications:
- Plous, S., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2004, September 10). How social science can reduce terrorism. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B9-B10.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1999). Discontinuity theory: Cognitive and social searches for rationality and normality--May lead to madness. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 31, 345-486.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1970). The human choice: Individuation, reason, and order versus deindividuation, impulse, and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), 1969 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (pp. 237-307). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
- Zimbardo, P. G., Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Jaffe, D. (1973, April 8). The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. The New York Times Magazine, Section 6, 36, ff.
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