| Philip George Zimbardo | |
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Zimbardo speaking in Poland, 2009
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| Born | March 23, 1933 New York City, New York |
| Residence | United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | Yale University New York University Columbia University Stanford University |
| Alma mater | Brooklyn College Yale University |
| Known for | Stanford prison study, spouse of Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley, Time paradox, Lucifer Effect, Abu Ghraib |
| Influences | Stanley Milgram |
| Spouse | Christina Maslach |
Philip George Zimbardo (born March 23, 1933) is an psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is president of the Heroic Imagination Project. He is known for his Stanford prison study and authorship of various introductory psychology books and textbooks for college students, including The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox.
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Zimbardo was born in New York City on March 23, 1933, from a family of Sicilian immigrants. He completed his BA with a triple major in psychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1954, where he graduated summa cum laude. He completed his M.S. (1955) and Ph.D (1959) in psychology from Yale University, where Neal E. Miller was his advisor.[1] He taught at Yale from 1959 to 1960. From 1960 to 1967, he was a professor of psychology at New York University. From 1967 to 1968, he taught at Columbia University. He joined the faculty at Stanford University in 1968.
In 1971, Zimbardo accepted a tenured position as professor of psychology at Stanford University. With a government grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, he conducted the Stanford prison study in which 24 normal college students were randomly assigned to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford (three additional college students were selected as alternates, but did not participate in the study). The two week planned study into the psychology of prison life ended only after 6 days due to emotional trauma being experienced by the participants. The students quickly began acting out their roles, with "guards" becoming sadistic and "prisoners" showing extreme passivity and depression.
The volunteers knew they were being used in a study but they did not know when the study would be taking place, so the initial shock of being randomly arrested one morning and taken to the mock prison put them in a mild state of shock. On arrival, the “prisoners” were stripped, searched, shaved and deloused, which caused a great deal of humiliation. They were then issued uniforms, ID numbers, and escorted to their cells by the volunteer prison guards. These changes isolated the prisoners making it harder for them to portray their individual characteristics. The guards themselves were not given any specific instruction or guidelines for the way they were to treat the prisoners. Instead, the psychologists allowed them to do whatever was needed to keep order in the prison. They were dressed very professionally in identical uniforms. They also wore a whistle around their neck and carried a night stick.
At the beginning of the experiment, Zimbardo started off with nine guards and nine prisoners. All the original volunteers were kept as backups and 3 prisoners as well as 3 guards occupied the prison at a time. Their first night in the prison, the volunteer prisoners were awakened at 2:30 AM by the guards blowing their whistles. They did this several times to familiarize the prisoners with how things were going to work and to let them know who was in charge.
The study shows that before the volunteer prisoners started showing signs of distress, they did not take the guards and their authority seriously. The prisoners mocked the guards, trying to regain their individuality. This, however, was short-lived. The prisoners soon realized that the attitude of the guards was very serious and that they demanded obedience. This began a long string of confrontational quarrels between the guards and prisoners. The guards used physical punishment and exercises, such as pushups, in order to show their authority to the prisoners.
In the morning of only the second day, a rebellion broke out among the volunteer prisoners. They ripped off their uniforms and locked themselves in their cells by pushing their beds up against the door. In response to this, the guards became very angry and called for backup assistance to the situation. This surprised Zimbardo as well as the rest of the psychologists because they had not thought it would be taken this far. Guards who were not on duty were called in and the guards who were assigned to only the night shift stayed with the guards who came in all the way through their shift the next morning. The tactic the guards came up with was to fight back in order to discipline the unruly prisoners and make them obey. In response to the prisoners barricading themselves in their cells, the guards used fire extinguishers on them to get them away from the entrances.
Once the guards were able to get into the cells, they stripped the inmates naked, tore apart the beds and the cell, and put the prisoners who had started the rebellion in solitary confinement. As all nine guards could not be on duty at once, they began rewarding the prisoners for good behavior. The prisoners who had not been involved in starting the riot were allowed to lie in their beds, wash themselves and brush their teeth and eat while those who had started the riot were not allowed to. The guards continued to use tormenting tactics to break up the prisoners relations with each other to avoid further organized resistance. In the case with one prisoner, who was a smoker, the guards were able to control his behavior because they decided when and if he was allowed to smoke.
Less than two full days into the experiment, one inmate began suffering from depression, uncontrolled rage, crying and other mental dysfunctions. The prisoner was eventually released after screaming and acting unstable in front of the other inmates.
On the third day, the study allowed visiting hours for friends and family. The visitation was closely monitored and timed with many rules and restrictions.
The next event that added to the prison experiment “drama” was a rumored escape plan that the prisoners were planning on carrying out directly after visiting hours. The prisoner was going to have some of his friends round up, break into the prison and free all of the prisoners. After one of the guards overheard this plan, an informant was placed in among the prisoners and the escape never happened. The prisoners who had been thought to have organized the escape were disciplined and harassed with more pushups and toilet cleaning.
At some point, even the prisoners who were thought of as role models, those who obeyed all of the guards' commands were being punished. Going to the bathroom was considered a privilege rather than a necessity, and those who acted out against the guards were made to urinate and defecate in a bucket in their cell.
By the end of the experiment, there was no unification among prisoners as well as guards. The guards also had won complete control over all of their prisoners and were using their authority to its greatest extent. One prisoner had even gone as far as to go on a hunger strike. Refusing to eat, the guards put him into solitary confinement for three hours (even though their own rules stated the limit that a prisoner could be in solitary confinement was only one hour). Instead of the other prisoners looking at this inmate as a hero and following along in his strike, they chanted together that he was a bad prisoner and a troublemaker. The prisoners literally had begun to think they were real criminals. Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations.
One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and five had to be removed from the study early.
Zimbardo himself started to give into the roles of the situation. He had to be shown the reality of the experiment by Christina Maslach, his girlfriend and future wife, who had just received her doctorate in psychology.[2]
At the end of the experiment, after all the prisoners had been released and the guards let go, everyone was brought back into the same room for evaluation and to be able to get their feelings out in the open towards one another. Ethical concerns surrounding the famous study often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend.
There were ethical issues in researching the original study. A subsequent study looked at the power of roles in selected situations.[3]
A 2006 study was conducted by the British Broadcasting Company replicating the study by Zimbardo.[4] This study, due to the fact that was conducted in later times, had more restrictions. While there were restrictions, there were also great differences. The first of the differences was how the participants were filtered. The Stanford Prison Experiment only gave the participants interviews and then certain personality tests. The BBC study used first psychometric tests, which combined a series of personality, attitude and mood tests. These tests were self-report tests. The second measure to filter the participants was a telephone interview. If they had passed through the first two filters the final was a full clinical interview. The second difference was how the participants were labeled either to be guards or prisoners. The Stanford Prison Experiment used random assignment to arrange them into the two groups. The BBC study first divided the participants into groups of smaller numbers in which they were organized by key psychological dimensions. From here they were then separated into prisoners and guards. Another difference was how the prisoners were brought to the mock prisons. The Stanford Prison Experiment participants were actually arrested for crimes which they did not commit, while those in the BBC study were just brought to the location by a blacked out car.
When it comes to the difference in the results between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the BBC prison study, it is clear that the BBC study is more of a struggle to figure out what to do when there is no direction given. There was more of a conflict within the two groups than between the two groups themselves. The Stanford Prison Experiment was looking at what happened when you gave one group authority over another and the power the situation.[5] Philip Zimbardo himself even made a critique on the BBC study describing the differences in the setup, execution and results of the study. The setup differences range from the actual participants age and how the Stanford Prison Experiment actually used college students, while the BBC prison study used men of different ages. The two studies differed with how they were executed and how rules were set up and a hierarchy was put in place. Neither of these happened in the BBC prison study. In the conclusion, Zimbardo states that the conclusion was only one that was put in place for media, not for science.[6]
After the prison experiment, Zimbardo decided to look for ways he could use psychology to help people; this led to the founding of The Shyness Clinic in Menlo Park, California, which treats shy behavior in adults and children. Zimbardo's research on shyness resulted in several bestselling books on the topic. Other subjects he has researched include mind control and cultic behavior.[7]
Zimbardo is the co-author of an introductory Psychology textbook entitled Psychology and Life, which is used in many American undergraduate psychology courses. He also hosted a PBS TV series titled Discovering Psychology which is used in many college telecourses.[8]
In 2002, Zimbardo was elected president of the American Psychological Association. Under his direction, the organization developed the website PsychologyMatters.org, a compendium of psychological research that has applications for everyday life. Also that year, he appeared in the British reality television show, The Human Zoo. Participants were observed inside a controlled setting while Zimbardo and a British psychologist analyzed their behavior.
In 2004, Zimbardo testified for the defense in the court martial of Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, a guard at Abu Ghraib prison. He argued that Frederick's sentence should be lessened due to mitigating circumstances, explaining that few individuals can resist the powerful situational pressures of a prison, particularly without proper training and supervision. The judge apparently disregarded Zimbardo's testimony, and gave Frederick the maximum 8-year sentence. Zimbardo drew on the knowledge he gained from his participation in the Frederick case to write a new book entitled, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, about the connections between Abu Ghraib and the prison experiments.[9]
In September 2006, Zimbardo joined the faculty at Pacific Graduate School of Psychology as Professor of Psychology, where he teaches social psychology to doctoral students in the clinical psychology program.
Zimbardo's writing appeared in Greater Good Magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley. Zimbardo's contributions include the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships. His most recent article with Greater Good magazine is entitled: "The Banality of Heroism", which examines how ordinary people can become everyday heroes. In February 2010, Zimbardo was a guest presenter at the Science of a Meaningful Life seminar: Goodness, Evil, and Everyday Heroism, along with Greater Good Science Center Executive Director Dacher Keltner.
Zimbardo, who officially retired in 2003, gave his final "Exploring Human Nature" lecture on March 7, 2007, on the Stanford campus, bringing his teaching career of 50 years to a close. David Spiegel, professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, called Zimbardo "a legendary teacher", saying that "he has changed the way we think about social influences."[10]
Though retired Zimbardo still conducts research at Stanford University and teaches one class at the former Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, now Palo Alto University.
Zimbardo has made appearances on American TV, such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on March 29, 2007,[11] The Colbert Report on February 11, 2008 [12] and Dr. Phil on October 25, 2010. [13]
Zimbardo is currently heading a movement for everyday heroism as the founder and director of The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting heroism in everyday life. The project is currently collecting data from former American gang members and former individuals with ties to terrorism for comparison, in an attempt to better understand how individuals change violent behavior. This research portion of the project is co-headed by Dr. Rony Berger, Dr. Yotam Heineburg, and Dr. Leonard Beckum. [14]
In 2005, Zimbardo received the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation Vision 97 Award in Prague.
In 2003, Zimbardo, Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli an academic of the University of Rome La Sapienza were awarded the sarcastic Ig Nobel Award for Psychology[15] for their report "Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities."[16]
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