The reason is clear.
“Many people go about their daily lives believing that they have more control than they really do,” wrote a young psychology professor at Stanford University in 1971. and manipulate our behavior.”
To prove the statement, the professor devised an experiment.
Together with 24 male graduate students, he built a prison in the basement of one of the university buildings. Cells are 6 feet to 9 feet. According to the coin toss, students are divided into prisoners and guards. The professor is the warden.
One day, the students (“gentle-looking and caring young people,” as he later said) meet each other. The guards became mean and tyrannical, the prisoners sad, angry and withdrawn.
The study is planned to last two weeks. It closed after six days, but its implications have had a profound impact ever since.
The chief architect of this landmark and controversial study – known as the “Stanford Prison Experiment” – was Philip G. Zimbardo, who died on October 14 at his home in San Francisco, according to Stanford University. He is 91 years old.
Hailed as “one of the most prolific and influential psychologists of his generation” by his Stanford colleagues, Zimbardo has also been criticized for the active and non-objective role he played in the experiment. But even when his methodology was questioned, he opened the door for generations of social scientists to analyze the often subjective and inchoate aspects of human emotions and behavior.
Intrigued by shyness, Zimbardo founded the Stanford Shyness Clinic to uncover the root causes of anxiety, panic and social phobia. Interested in altruism, he founded the Heroic Imagination Project, with the belief – in his own words – that “every seemingly ordinary person on the planet is capable of heroic deeds.”
He is president of the American Psychological Assn. in 2002 and, after his retirement, was honored for his volunteer service to Stanford. He was the recipient of the 2006 Havel foundation prize for outstanding work in the field of science and was awarded the Richard W. Lyman Award for “contributions to the development and integration of psychological research and social action.”
Born in New York City on March 23, 1933, Zimbardo grew up in the Bronx. The eldest of four children, he attended Brooklyn College and Yale University, where he earned a master’s degree in experimental psychology and a doctorate in social psychology. After teaching at New York University and Columbia University, he joined the Stanford faculty in 1968.
At that time, psychology was an increasingly popular and influential field of inquiry. The writings of Erik Erikson, RD Laing and DW Winnicott quickly changed assumptions about the development of the human mind.
Zimbardo’s class “Introduction to Psychology” is so popular that students trying to get admission often form outside the office and run to the university quadrangles.
Arguing that social structures – from workplaces to schools, neighborhoods to homes – can influence a variety of behaviors, Zimbardo shows that when people feel anonymous and superior and believe that they can act with impunity, they will ignore the well-being of others.
As a young researcher, he once parked a beat-up car in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Palo Alto, and during three days of observation, he noticed that the car had been abandoned. Destructive action, he concludes, is not encouraged by a sense of community and dissent.
Conversely, destructive behavior thrives in disaffected communities.
After the 1978 mass murder and suicide of 909 people in the Jonestown settlement in Guyana directed by charismatic leader Jim Jones, Zimbardo explored the social dynamics of cults. After calling for an inquiry into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison, Zimbardo was named to the commission.
His work has ongoing implications for the study of “extreme forms of influence,” such as terrorist recruitment, cults and “man’s ability or resilience in the face of the power of authority.”
“Understanding the dynamics and pervasiveness of situational power is important to learn how to resist,” he wrote in 2002, “and to reduce the dominance of the many agents of mind control that do their daily business in all of us behind many faces and fronts.”
But his work in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus defined his reputation.
Writing 25 years after the Stanford Prison Experiment, he and co-author Craig Haney, a fellow researcher in 1971, were honest about how “surprising and unexpected” the results were: they changed “a large number of participants in ways that we did not anticipate, prepared for. or prediction.”
As much of the academic community and the general public were confused by his conclusions, Zimbardo understood the importance of showing that psychological research can be applied to everyday life and understood and appreciated by nonprofessionals.
He passionately asserts that psychology is relevant to the national dialogue on crime and justice and blames “politicians and policy makers (who are now) visible, worshiping institutional power whose bad effects have been evaluated in the last 25 years.”
By applying modern psychological methods and theories to the origins of crime and the pain of imprisonment, he hoped for “genuine and meaningful criminal justice and prison reform.”
“There has never been a more critical time to begin an intellectual struggle with those who would demean human nature by using prisons exclusively as an institution of social control that punishes without attempting to rehabilitate, that isolates and oppresses rather than educates and uplifts, and that destroys minority communities rather than protect and strengthen.
