Phillip Zimbardo: Controversy and Genius

Phillip Zimbardo. Its a name that brings to mind a brutal

underground prison, rife with violence and egregious violations of
human rights. Indeed Phillip Zimbardo was and is one of the most
infamous names in modern psychology and is known for the incredible
Stanford Prison Experiment. But while many besmirch him for being an
unethical and ruthless psychologist who would stop at nothing to
achieve results at the expense of his subjects, they fail to see him for
what he really was, a pioneer in the field of behavioral psychology and
the man who changed the way we think about situational influences on
behavior. Zimbardo was born on March 23, 1933 in New York City. He
attended Brooklyn College where he earned his B.A. in 1954, his M.A. in
psychology the subsequent year, and his Ph.D in psychology from Yale
University four years later. He taught briefly at Yale before moving New
York University where he worked until 1967. After moving to and
teaching at Columbia University for one year, he joined the Stanford
Faculty in 1968 and has since remained there. It was here that
Zimbardo began his controversial work regarding external influences
on human behavior and started the Stanford Prison Experiment in the
basement of the Stanford psychology building in 1971. 24 male college
students were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or
"prisoners" in the mock subterranean prison. Soon after beginning the
students began to adopt the roles in which they were placed. The
guards began to think of the prisoners as unruly inmates in need of
discipline and punishment and began to cruelly act on those
sentiments, while the prisoners sunk into depression as the
helplessness of the situation overwhelmed them. Although the study
was initially supposed to last two weeks, it was terminated after just
six days. Zimbardo was criticized extensively for his lack of ethics
during the study, including his refusal to allow the participants to exit
the study or prevent harm from coming to them. Despite these foibles,
the Stanford Prison Experiment remains an important study in our
understanding external influences on human behavior. The study
became of significant interest following the public revelation of the Abu
Grahib prisoner abuses in Iraq at the hands of US soldiers. Since his
famous experiment, Zimbardo has continued to research a variety of
topics including shyness, cult behavior and heroism. He has also
authored and co-authored numerous psychology related books in

widespread use. In 2002, Zimbardo was elected president of the

American Psychological Association. He finally retired from Stanford in
2003 but continues to work as the director of the organization he
founded called the Heroic Imagination Project a project that
encourages people to act as heroes in modern society and be agents of
social change. Despite his flawed and seemingly appalling experiment,
Zimbardo was a man of great influence on modern day behavioral
psychological research. Surely, his name will live on as one of great
controversy and great genius.