Holy Zim!
Tonight on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: psychologist Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, $27.95, 9781400064113/1400064112).
Phil Zimbardo was my old professor. He had a face lift, a hip replacement, a limo with “Zim” as the vanity plate, and a parking spot way past where any car was allowed. He ‘taught’ a lecture on Intro to Psych, which is to say he showed up once a semester and filled the other 9 weeks with guest lecturers. He also taught a class called ‘Faces of Evil,’ wrote a book of the same name, and was the infamous creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, also the name of a band, was a highly unethical experiment in which students were asked to pretend they were prisoners or guards (randomly) and Zimbardo was the prison warden. The ‘guards’ beat the ‘prisoners’ and forced them to do things like eat food off the floor, stand upright in a closet for hours on end. Remember, they were divided randomly at the beginning. At one point Zimbardo as the warden told the ‘prisoners’ they had to get lawyers to get out of the experiment. Supposedly it helped explain how Nazi Germany happened (how authority and roles made people do bad things).
The American Psychology Association created an ethics board not many months after this experiment was finished. That did not stop him from making a lucrative career out it. He always gave me the willies, just talking to him and standing next to him. His library was even scarier then he was, and I had lab meetings there.
Phil Zimbardo was my old professor. He had a face lift, a hip replacement, a limo with “Zim” as the vanity plate, and a parking spot way past where any car was allowed. He ‘taught’ a lecture on Intro to Psych, which is to say he showed up once a semester and filled the other 9 weeks with guest lecturers. He also taught a class called ‘Faces of Evil,’ wrote a book of the same name, and was the infamous creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment, also the name of a band, was a highly unethical experiment in which students were asked to pretend they were prisoners or guards (randomly) and Zimbardo was the prison warden. The ‘guards’ beat the ‘prisoners’ and forced them to do things like eat food off the floor, stand upright in a closet for hours on end. Remember, they were divided randomly at the beginning. At one point Zimbardo as the warden told the ‘prisoners’ they had to get lawyers to get out of the experiment. Supposedly it helped explain how Nazi Germany happened (how authority and roles made people do bad things).
The American Psychology Association created an ethics board not many months after this experiment was finished. That did not stop him from making a lucrative career out it. He always gave me the willies, just talking to him and standing next to him. His library was even scarier then he was, and I had lab meetings there.
posted by eno at 12:40 PM
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