Phillip Zimbardo

User Profile

Biography

Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the “voice and face of contemporary American psychology” through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment, authoring the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, in its 18th Edition, and his popular trade books on Shyness in adults and in children; Shyness: What it is, what to do about it, and The Shy Child. Past president of the American Psychological Association, and the Western Psychological Association.

Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor), having taught previously at Yale, NYU, and Columbia University. He is currently on the faculty of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, CA. He has been given numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, writer, and service to the profession. Recently, he was awarded the Vaclav Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition. His more than 300 professional publications and 50 books convey his research interests in the domain of social psychology, with a broad spread of interests from shyness to time perspective, madness, cults, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil.

Zimbardo has served also as the Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations (with 1.5 million members), and now is Chair of the Western Psychological Foundation. He heads a philanthropic foundation in his name to promote student education in his ancestral Sicilian towns. Zimbardo adds further to his retirement list activities: serving as the new executive director of a Stanford center on terrorism -- the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism (CIPERT). He was an expert witness for one of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib Prison abuses, and has studied the interrogation procedures used by the military in that and other prisons as well as by Greek and Brazilian police torturers.

Noted for his personal and professional efforts to actually 'give psychology away to the public', Zimbardo has also been a social-political activist, challenging the U.S. Government's wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the American Correctional System.

His new book has been a New York Times bestseller: THE LUCIFER EFFECT: UNDERSTANDING HOW GOOD PEOPLE TURN EVIL (Random House, 2007; see www.lucifereffect.org).

Faculty Publications Link

Click here for a list of Dr. Zimbardo's Scholarly Books and Monographs.

Click here to be redirected to Dr. Zimbardo's website for a complete list of publications.