Philip Zimbardo, PhD, is one of the most recognizable names in the field of psychology. In this episode, Zimbardo discusses recent criticism of his controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment as well as his other work on time, shyness, men and heroism.
Philip Zimbardo is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is also president of the Heroic Imagination Project, which teaches people how to overcome the natural human tendency to watch and wait in moments of crisis. Zimbardo is perhaps best known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which demonstrated the power of social situations to influence people’s behavior. He has authored more than 300 professional articles, chapters and books representing his broad and varied interests in topics ranging from exploratory and sexual behavior in rats to persuasion, dissonance, hypnosis, cults, shyness, time perspective, prisons and madness.
Kaitlin Luna: Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, perhaps most well-known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Over his six-decade career, Dr. Zimbardo has done research, written books and given TED talks on a wide variety of topics including evil, time, men's health and shyness. Welcome Dr. Zimbardo.
Philip Zimbardo: Thank you, great to be here with you.
Kaitlin Luna: Now you're in a new venture called the Heroic Imagination Project which inspires everyday heroism. Can you talk about that premise and explain how you train people to be heroes?
Philip Zimbardo: Yes, I would like everybody in the world to be a hero-in-training. And the idea was that after I did the Stanford Prison study which really in 1971 which is really a follow-up of the earlier work by Stanley Milgram and many people don't know that little Stanley and I were in the same high school class at James Monroe High School in the Bronx in the 50s but his research you know showed how easy it is for good people to violate their conscience and harm another person at the request of an authority. I wanted to expand that to say, you know more evil happens when more people are playing roles, but nobody tells you to do anything wrong, but in that role it becomes what you do so be a prison guard your job is to suppress prison riots, your job is to dominate control prisoners, and so there was a body of research now in the social psychology Milgram study, my study, a study by my colleague Albert Bandura to show how easy it is for good people to dehumanize others, to steal, to lie, to cheat and harm other people. And then in 2007, I think, I gave a TED talk, I think it was 2007, and it was on the psychology of evil and it was one of the most popular talks and like, you know, how many millions of people have seen it, but at the end of the talk I raised an issue of we now know how easy it is for good people to be seduced into doing evil but I said to the audience, “Do you think it's possible that we could inspire and even train ordinary people to become heroes?”. And it hit a responsive chord and that's, I just wanted to have a dramatic ending to the talk, and many people in the audience came up including Al Gore, Pierre Omidyar, the person started eBay, he said, “Hey you have to follow this up.” I said “What do you mean? You have to have a foundation, you have to have a team, so I did so in 2010 I organized in San Francisco the Heroic Imagination Project, it's a non-profit foundation in which what I've tried to do is to use basic knowledge in psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology as a training platform so we want to inspire people, you know, meaning you should become a hero, you should do good, but it's a different kind of hero, it's not military, it's not political, it's ordinary people, especially youth, doing daily deeds of goodness and kindness and we teach you how to do it based on fundamental principles in psychology.
Kaitlin Luna: What are some of those success stories you've seen, I mean, some success stories you've had?
Philip Zimbardo: Oh, so essentially, so we have these lessons that I've created on how to transform passive bystanders into active heroes using all the research we know from [John] Darley and [Bibb] Latané from the bystander effect. Using research from Carol Dweck, my colleague at Stanford, on how to transform people who have a narrow fixed static mindset into a dynamic growth mindset, how to transform stereotype prejudice discrimination into understanding and acceptance of others who are different. So we have a number of these lessons. Each lesson is like three hours long, they're filled with provocative videos, and I and some of my team, we go around the world training teachers and training people in human relations, how to deliver these lessons effectively. And so the lessons are licensed for a relatively small fee to schools, school districts, prisons, prison setups or HR organizations within business. We’re now in a dozen countries, literally globally around the world. Our most successful program surprisingly is in Hungary. In Hungary they have a foundation called Heroes’ Square Initiative, and I'm on their board of directors, and what's astounding was, I gave a talk there four years ago about this and at the end several people came up and said, “It’s really interesting, Hungarians are the most pessimistic people in the world so as soon as you say something new, they say ‘It won't work here’ and I said ‘Give me a chance, it's a challenge’.” And so the next day I actually did a training workshop at a training and now it's the most successful program in the whole world, meaning our program is in more than a thousand high schools, in many, many businesses. What we do is often videotape and present it on Hungarian TV “What Would You Do” so we reenact, you know, people lying on the ground and seeing who comes to help and who doesn't and so that's our model program. But we're in Poland, we're in Bali we're in Geelong, Australia. In Iran, I started a program in Tehran, in Iran. Let's see I'm about to go to Portugal to set up a program there but it's really exciting for me to see this emerging. Curiously since we're now in APA in San Francisco, our program is almost non-existent in San Francisco where I live and partly because the heads of school districts say, “We don't have time in our curriculum to add this. It seems interesting and important, but our students have all of their curriculum totally planned for them.” And I say, “You know that's really sad you can't work this in.” It could even obviously be an after-school program.
Kaitlin Luna: So that's your next step is to set it up in your own backyard.
Philip Zimbardo: Yeah, I mean I have to make it work here as well. So I gave a talk this morning about the hero project and people said, “We want your program in Kenya”, “We want your program in Armenia”, and Guatemala, you know. But nobody came up and said, “We'd like to have your program here”, so it's a paradox.
Kaitlin Luna: I want to touch back on the Stanford Prison Experiment. So, I have a brief synopsis folks might not be familiar, but it was in 1971 at Stanford University. There was nine men who were volunteers — so they were either the guards are the prisoners and it was supposed to go for two weeks…
Philip Zimbardo: Nine men guards, the nine men.
Kaitlin Luna: OK, so 18 yeah and supposed to go for two weeks but it ended — was cut short because essentially you were seeing that the guards are becoming psychologically abusive to the prisoners.
And that study has been used to explain the human rights abuses from the Vietnam War to Holocaust and a variety of atrocities that have happened. But, there has been criticism and you've addressed over the years and most recently there's been new criticism by the guards saying they were coached, and one man said you fake to break down, so he could study for his graduate exam. So what is your response to that?
Philip Zimbardo: Yeah, so Stanford Prison study is really — has become maybe the most iconic widely known study in psychology literally around the world. And, and the problem has been from the very beginning I said, this is really, it should not have been called Stanford's experiment. It should have been called the Stanford Prison exploration. It's really exploring the boundaries of human nature. And so the terrible thing was so in our study, we actually recruited 24 college students from all over America. They were not from Stanford. We did it at Stanford and we gave them a personality test, did clinical interviews and we picked two dozen who at the beginning were the most psychologically healthy and normal and then we randomly assigned half to guards, half to prisons. So, we had nine prisoners — three of each in three cells and nine guards, each of which work eight-hour shifts.
And then we had backup prisoners and guards. And, and so again, at the beginning there was no difference between a prisoner and guard. And again, it's 1971. What does that mean? You're in the middle of the Vietnam War. Students, college students everywhere hate the police, hate prison guards, because when students protested against the war, everywhere, including at Stanford and I led some of those protests — the administration often called the cops onto the campus and there were physical confrontations. And in some places, like Kent State, Ohio, the National Guard actually killed students.
You know, so nobody wanted to be a guard. Now, there's a movie, there's a Hollywood movie called the Stanford Prison Experiment — it just came out. And at the beginning of the movie it looks as if my staff is asking each of the people do you want to be a prison guard, and somebody said, “Nobody wants to see a guard, nobody likes guards.” But what it meant was you had to be a guard, but everybody knew it was an experiment. You sign the informed consent and then the guards would get — we went with the guards. They picked out at the Army-Navy store their uniform, so they're all now in military uniforms, which they hate the military. They hate cops, so they felt awkward. The prisoners were going to humanize. They were just in smocks with a number and they became the number. And so, on day one nothing happened. In fact, what happened, one of the things that happened was you can hear. So, we have 12, 14 hours of audio tapes and everything that happened, and you can hear the guards saying, “Come on guys, let's take this seriously.” And I'm looking, I said, “Oh my God, this is not going to work.” I mean, it's you know and then in fact, so I played the role of superintendent. An undergraduate, David Jaffe, played the role of warden and I had two graduate students, Craig Haiti and Curt Banks, who are my lieutenants. But, most of the time it was just guards and prisoners on the yard and we were looking in and making videos.
And what happens is at one point, you know, there was so there's three guards on this shift and you know two of the guards are telling the prisoners do push-ups, count off your numbers and one of the guards are sitting in the court is smoke a cigarette. So, David Jaffe goes him and says, “Come on, you’re getting fifteen bucks a day, you've got to do something. Now, why don't you want your act as if you're a tough guard?” And we have now everything we did is on audiotape, videotape and everything we did is in the archives not only of Stanford, but Akron University Psychology Museum.
So now recently, the study has come under attack by a number of bloggers in Medium and Vox and other places. And so, they say they have unearthed from what I made available. I made available 44 boxes, every bit of information from the study — all the diaries, the observation of the center. They uncovered that the guards were told to be abusive to the prisoners and so it's not that playing a role did it. They were told to do it.
What we show is the warden told one guard and only one guard that he should be tough. Being tough did not translate into what the guards also they did, including having prisoners simulate sodomy, which is similar to what happened later in Abu Ghraib, where American prison guards had Iraqi prisoners simulate fellatio. So I'm saying the criticism is the guards were told to be abusive. I got one guy, only one guard is told to be tough and he's on one shift, so the guards and the other shift didn't even know that. But then there's other criticisms that I went through each criticism, so one of the blogs said that the first prisoner to break down in 36 hours, prisoner 8612 Doug Corby, he recently told them that he was faking it. Doug Corby is really an interesting person. In my book The Lucifer Effect, I have a whole section about him. He said he was faking it. Ultimately, he said he was not faking it — keeps changing his story. Partly he was embarrassed, he was ashamed of losing control and we went back and found the original video we made of him in which he's telling a student, “I was never so upset in my whole life. I lost control of my feelings and of the situation.” That's him saying it. You know, that was 14 years after the study and now he's reversing his story.
So, I went through each of the criticisms and we have online — I hope your viewers will go there. I wrote a 22-page detailed response — not a rebuttal, of each of the criticisms and I say here's the evidence. Oh, so for example, they said Carlo Prescott, an African-American ex-convict who is my consultant for the study, wrote an article to Stanford Daily saying it was all a lie. Carlo Prescott never wrote that. Somebody else wrote it and put his name in. Carlo Prescott doesn't type. He doesn't have a typewriter. And so, we put online we had made an audio Carlo Prescott saying at two weeks ago, “I didn't write a word of it. I know who did it. I don't want to mention his name, but I will if need be.” He said, “Zimbardo's my buddy – we’re blood buddies. I would never do that.”
So, if you go online it's prisonexp.org. And then we have all the criticism and rebuttals so as far as I'm concerned, it's now settled.
Kaitlin Luna: Well, keeping this all in context, what and many years later what do you think — what are the truths about human nature do you think your experiment highlighted?
Philip Zimbardo: I see it as not negative. I see it as human nature is incredibly pliable, flexible and that what it really says is we underestimate the extent to which our behavior is influenced by the situation. What other people are doing and saying, how we dress, what the ambience is, whether it's a professional thing, whether it's a rock party, whatever.
And situations can push good people to do bad things, but now the Heroic Imagination Project says, let's work to create positive situations, which bring out the best in us. So, the idea is people can be good or bad, you know. Devils or angels and all I’m saying is we have to be more aware of the power of social situations to shape us and then put, invest in having better schools, better social welfare programs that bring out the best in people and suppress the worst.
Kaitlin Luna: And if you were to conduct this experiment today, would you do anything differently?
Philip Zimbardo: Oh sure. Okay the problem now is the study can never be replicated because once it was over, now we should say even though it's 1971, Stanford University was one of the first universities to have a human subjects review committee. So, they reviewed the study and it had some limitation with things we had to do, which we did. But again, it's kids playing cops and robbers, and everybody knew it was the study. Everybody signed a statement. I'm going to be a prisoner or a guard because if I'm a prisoner there'll be some stress, minimal diet. So, everybody knew it was an experiment you know, and so human subjects can be said they knew his experiment. It's in Stanford. What could go wrong?
They, like I, underestimated how powerful that situation can become. And within 36 hours it became a prison run by psychologists. No one used the word experiment. So, for example we said in the thing at any time if anybody says, “I quit the experiment,” I would release them.
Nobody said that. They said, “I want to see a lawyer.” “I want my mother.” “I want a doctor.” You know? And so, I insisted they had to use that phrase before that, but it didn't become an experiment in anybody's mind after the first day.
So, what we would do for example, what would happen if it was all women? That's what I thought about immediately. What would happen if it was all minorities? Would it be different if there was older people, more wise, than college students? So, there are a lot of interesting things that would be interesting for us to know, but we can never know that again.
Kaitlin Luna: And moving on to another topic, you've done a TED talk on about time and you in that talk you spoke about how as humans we either live in the past, present or future. And you talked about the negative aspects and all three of those things and you said the most optimal way of being is to be in all three realms but focusing on the positive. Can you talk to explain that a little more?
Philip Zimbardo: So, one of the things that came — two things that came out of the prison study, which have shaped a lot of my life was because there were no clocks, there were no windows, so we all lost track of time — that is, you know, I lived in my office upstairs. I would come down for extended periods. The guards worked eight-hour shifts. They went home, came back. The prisoners lived there all the time. But when we were there, we lost track of time because when the guards were on, they were doing all kinds of stuff, you know, making the prisoners jump up and down and do counts, and so I became aware as this was going on that about the psychology of time — how time is not objective. There's objective time, but there's also subjective time.
I began to think about it and do literature search and then I realized that one aspect of time is our sense of time perspective. That is, we live in the past, present or future.
So, right now as we're talking, this is the present. When we were setting up, that’s the past. What we're going to do at the end of this, is the future. But, in thinking about it, I realized that there was very little literature on the psychology of time perspective and I developed a scale called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventories (ZTPI), published in the Journal of Personality Social Psychology in 1999.
Then I wrote a book “The Time Paradox” and what we say is that we all live in different time zones at different time and there's two ways to live in the present - in the past - one is positive, one is negative. So, in our scale we say, you know, when you think about your past, what comes to mind? For some people, it's success, happiness, birthday parties, graduations. For others, it's abuse, neglect, missed opportunities.
So then, we can identify people who are past-negative or past-positive. When we talk about the future, some people say the future is the key to success in life — to be educated, not to make rash decisions, always thinking about the consequences of your action.
On the other hand, for some people, when they think about their futures, it’s filled with anxiety. Will I be able to succeed? Will I be able to find a wonderful wife? Will I be able to get a good job? So, the future can be positive for some and negative.
And then the present, what we've discovered is there are people who are present fatalistic. They say, doesn't pay to plan. My life is controlled by forces outside of me. This is true — of poor people, people from certain religions.
Another way to be present orient is the present hedonistic, meaning you live for the moment. You live for excitement. You live for sensation. You live for novelty. These people get addicted because you always want something exciting and new.
Kaitlin Luna: So, do you think it's still the optimal way of being is to be in any of those realms but be focusing on the positive aspect?
Philip Zimbardo: Yeah, so the optimal and we have a lot of, now, research. It's called having a balanced time perspective, which means low unpassed negative — low on future negative — low on present fatalism — moderate on present hedonism. Present hedonism is exciting when it's not in the extreme and moderately high on future. So, there's a balance time perspective and if you look at our scale – so, my scale has like 56 items — there's also a short form. I think we just go timeparadox.org. The scale is available to take and get scored. But, people have balanced time perspective, (BTP). We show in many, many realms, they are, have better self-esteem, more successful life, even physically, psychologically healthier and in many ways, this is the ideal in life and then we can we teach you how to develop that--how to lower the negatives and promote the positives.
Kaitlin Luna: Your research is also focused on men and in your TED talk and a book I was talking about how man had fallen behind women and achievements and social success. Can you talk about what your motivations behind this research was and what advice do you have for men?
Philip Zimbardo: Yeah, so the most recent thing I've been doing is focusing on why young men around the world, including America, are failing academically, socially and sexually. And I got interested in — I'm not a game player in general. I'm certainly not a video game player. But, I had students at Stanford. Had my son, Adam, were addicted to video games. And in those days, you put a quarter in a machine and you work some switch and now the video game is right here. So, it's with you all the time and there are people who now play — not people, men mostly. It's like 90 percent of men, 10 percent of women are addicted to video games.
What does addicted mean? They play ten or more hours every night. And if you're doing that, what are you not doing? You're not exercising. You're not taking time out to eat. You're not doing your homework, not doing anything creative. You're not taking hikes. If you're on sports teams, you give that up. You don't have time for friends or girlfriends.
And then what's happened now in the last few years, suddenly, here's online free pornography, which you know as an old timer you had it you had to go to a dingy penny arcade, put a quarter in the machine to watch some black-and-white, you know, French pornography film and now you press a button and there it is.
And so, now what we're seeing is young men with a double addiction — addiction to video games, addiction to pornography and it's and again what I say throughout is there's nothing wrong with either. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not pejorative. It's only when it's done in social isolation, meaning giving up friends and it's done in excess, because in excess means there's whole realms of your life that you are giving up.
And so, a lot of evidence is men are failing in high school. They're dropping out of school as soon as they can. They're dropping out of, even college. They're giving up girlfriends and they live in this world where on the video games, they dominate, they control the enemy in World of Warcraft. In pornography, there's these beautiful stunning model naked women who pretend they want to make love to you and it’s only going to cost you a dollar a minute. So, it's free. Once you get in it then we become hooked.
And now, on the other side, so I wrote a book about why young men are struggling, why young men are failing. The interesting thing is women are succeeding better than ever, not because men are failing, but women are simply working harder. Women are doing all the things men used to do but they're doing it better – better, smarter, wiser. So, last year, around the world women got more of every advanced degree – bachelor’s degrees, master, PhD, law and even engineering.
Now, there's still a glass ceiling where there's some men at the top that, you know, keeping the powerbrokers. But, I think that glass ceiling is going to be broken soon, hopefully.
Kaitlin Luna: And so, you've had a long and storied career. You've done a lot of different things and right now at this point you've done, you've had six decades worth of work. Is the Heroic Imagination Project your only project you are doing right now or what else are you doing or is that your sole focus?
Philip Zimbardo: Well, the hero project is the main thing. I literally go around the world to these different countries through training, but I'm on my way in a few weeks to Nyons, France, where we have an international time perspective conference, where researchers, scientists, businesspeople, artists come together, and we meet every two years. So, we’re meeting in France now, in Nyons. Last year, we met in Copenhagen. The two years before, we met in Warsaw. Two years before that in Coimbra, Portugal. So, that's really exciting.
I'm the grandfather of this movement because I developed a scale, which people use freely around the world as long as they share the research. So, we meet, we talk about the research, we talk about how to reshape our lives to make lives more fulfilling and exciting. So, the hero project is one dimension. The time perspective is the other dimension.
The thing I forgot and your question of what came out of the prison study, was shyness. Actually, shyness is the thing I would like to be most remembered for because what is shyness? The interesting thing it's a social handicap. People limit their freedom of speech, their freedom of association. And the curious thing is nobody says, hey, you're a shy person. Say I'm a shy person and, therefore, what? I can't do ABCDE. So, in a way, I conceptualize shyness as a self-imposed, psychological prison.
It's a prison in which you are your own guard and you are your own prisoner. So, the guard tells the prisoner you can't talk to her. You can't ask the boss for a raise even though you deserve it. Don't raise your hand to answer the question even though you know the answer. You're going to make a mistake, people are going to laugh at you and the prisoner in you says OK and the moment you say OK, you lower your self-esteem. And that's the formula for shyness.
So, I began to study shyness in 1972, the year after the prison study. I formed the Stanford Shyness Project. We began to do research on shyness and in 1972 there was zero research on shyness in all of psychology. And so, we did research and then my students said, hey we know a lot, why don't we try to help other shy students?
So, we formed the Stanford Shyness Clinic and we were incredibly successful because we knew exactly what shyness was — it's either you don't have the social skills, you have negative cognitions, which we can change, or you have physiological arousal — you blush.
And so, for each person we found out what, how does your how is your shyness manifested and then we could focus in, we could change this, this and this and we were incredibly successful. Forty years later our Shyness Clinic is still operating in Palo Alto University. So, for me that's the model. You get an idea, you do research on it, you forget data and I wrote a book “Shyness: What it is, What To Do About It,” which is very successful. Another book “The Shy Child” and then you can break that into a therapy that helps people. And so, for me, that's the model. An idea, research, share your ideas and therapy share your ideas in and the public domain through, we wrote articles for psychologists but also for the general public.
Kaitlin Luna: Well, it’s been my pleasure speaking with you, Dr. Zimbardo. Thank you for joining us on our podcast.
Philip Zimbardo: Great to be here.
Kaitlin Luna: Speaking of Psychology, is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts, like APA Journals Dialogue, about the latest and most exciting psychological research and Progress Notes, about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit speakingofpsychology.org to find more episodes and other resources for the topics we discuss. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna for the American Psychological Association.
