Words matter. These are the best Philip Zimbardo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.
Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.
After doing psychology for half a century, my passion for all of it is greater than ever.
Bullies are often people who are shy and can’t make friends easily, so, as the theme of the movie ‘A Bronx Tale’ tells us, it is better to be feared if you can’t be loved.
There are no limits to what I would do to make my classes exciting, interesting, unpredictable.
I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.
There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?
Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies.’
My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
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.
Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.
The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.
The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.
Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.
Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.
Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.
Academic success depends on research and publications.
Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.
One can’t live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.
At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We’re trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.