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Philip Zimbardo

social psychologist, university teacher, non-fiction writer, psychologist, screenwriter, author

1933 – 2024

Philip George Zimbardo was an American psychologist and a professor at Stanford University. He was an internationally known educator, researcher, author and media personality in psychology who authored more than 500 articles, chapters, textbooks, and trade books covering a wide range of topics, including time perspective, cognitive dissonance, the psychology of evil, persuasion, cults, deindividuation, shyness, and heroism. He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later criticized as being based on biased science. He authored various widely used, introductory psychology textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox.

All Quotes by Philip Zimbardo

“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“A good cult delivers on its promises. A good cult nourishes the needs of its members, has transparency and integrity, and creates provisions for challenging its leadership openly. A good cult expands the freedoms and well-being of its members rather than limits them.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“I'm saying to be a hero is means you step across the line and are willing to make a sacrifice, so heroes always are making a sacrifice. Heroes always take a risk. Heroes always deviant. Heroes always doing something that most people don't and we want to change - I want to democratise heroism to say any of us can be a hero.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.”

— Philip Zimbardo

“What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?”

— Philip Zimbardo