Philip Zimbardo
Philip Zimbardo is a prominent American psychologist, best known for his influential work in social psychology and his groundbreaking Stanford prison experiment conducted in 1971. Born in the South Bronx to Sicilian immigrant parents, Zimbardo emphasized the value of community and education, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University. His academic career included teaching positions at several prestigious institutions, culminating in a faculty role at Stanford University.
Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment provided powerful insights into how social situations can shape behavior, revealing the capacity for individuals to adopt roles that may conflict with their personal values. He is also noted for founding the Shyness Clinic at Stanford, which later became the Palo Alto Shyness Center, and for authoring several influential books on shyness. In addition to his research, he created the PBS television series "Discovering Psychology," which has been widely utilized in educational settings. His later work focused on time perspective, culminating in the publication of "The Time Paradox" and "The Time Cure," addressing how individuals can reshape their perceptions of time to improve their mental health. Zimbardo remained active in the field until his retirement from teaching in 2014.
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Philip Zimbardo
- Date of birth: March 23, 1933
- Place of birth: New York, New York
- Date of death: October 14, 2024
- Place of death: San Francisco, California
Zimbardo is a leading authority on the dynamics of shyness and the psychology of time perspective.
TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality; social psychology
Life
Philip Zimbardo, the son Sicilian immigrants, was raised in the South Bronx neighborhood of New York City where he learned the importance of having family and friends in his life as opposed to an abundance of material possessions. He also learned the catalyst that education would provide in his rise from poverty. He earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, sociology, and anthropology from Brooklyn College in 1954. After earning his doctorate in psychology from Yale University in 1959, Zimbardo taught psychology courses at Yale (1959–60), at New York University (1960–67), and at Columbia University (1967–68). In 1968, he accepted a position in the department of psychology at Stanford University in California.
Zimbardo’s most notable study was the infamous Stanford prison experiment in 1971. He assigned twenty-four mentally healthy students to act as either guards or prisoners in a mock prison constructed in the psychology building at Stanford. It was a classic demonstration illustrating the power of social situations to distort personalities, personal values, and moral standards, as the students took on the identities of the persons they were portraying. The guards exhibited sadistic characteristics, while the prisoners demonstrated passivity and depression.
To help people through the application of psychology, Zimbardo founded the Shyness Clinic at Stanford in 1975 to treat shyness in adolescents and adults. The clinic became the Palo Alto Shyness Center in 1982. Zimbardo’s best-known books on the subject of shyness are Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It (1977), The Shy Child: A Parent’s Guide to Preventing and Overcoming Shyness from Infancy to Adulthood (with Shirley L. Radl, 1981), and The Shyness and Social Anxiety Workbook (2008).
In 1990, Zimbardo designed, wrote, and hosted the twenty-six-part award-winning Public Broadcasting Service television series Discovering Psychology. It has been used widely in high schools and colleges. It was translated into ten different languages and updated in 2001. Zimbardo has also appeared on the British reality television show, The Human Zoo, in which the behavior of participants in a controlled setting is analyzed.
In 2002, Zimbardo served as president of the American Psychological Association (APA). His later research efforts concentrated on the psychology of time perspective, the ways that individuals develop temporal orientations associated with personal experiences that are related to past, present, or future events, or with beliefs about life after death. In 2008, Zimbardo published The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life in which he introduced his time-perspective theory as well as his Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). In 2012, he published with Richard Sword The Time Cure: Overcoming PTSD with the New Psychology of Time Perspective Therapy, which explains in detail the method that individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can change the ways in which they think about the past in order to transform how they live in the present. That same year, he received the APA Gold Medal Award for life achievement in the science of psychology.
Zimbardo retired from Stanford in 2003 but continued to teach part-time at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology. He taught at Palo Alto University from 2006 until his retirement in 2014.
Zimbardo died at the age of ninety-one on October 14, 2024.
Bibliography
Crozier, W. Ray. Understanding Shyness: Psychological Perspectives. Palgrave, 2001.
Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. Yale University Press, 2007.
Rosenwald, Michael S. "Philip Zimbardo, 91, Whose Stanford Prison Experiment Studied Evil, Dies." The New York Times, 31 Oct. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/science/philip-zimbardo-dead.html. Accessed 22 Jan. 2025.
Simonton, Dean Keith. Great Psychologists and Their Times: Scientific Insights into Psychology’s History. Amer. Psychological Assn., 2002.
Stolarski, Maciej, Joanna Bitner, and Philip G. Zimbardo. “Time Perspective, Emotional Intelligence, and Discounting of Delayed Awards.” Time & Society, vol. 20, no. 3, 2011, pp. 346–63.
Sword, Richard M., et al. “Time Perspective Therapy: A New Time-Based Metaphor Therapy for PTSD.” Journal of Loss and Trauma, vol. 19, no. 3, 2013, pp. 197–201.
Zhang, Jai Wei, et al. “Validating a Brief Measure of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory.” Time & Society, vol. 22, no. 3, 2013, pp. 391–409.