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. He is also the past president of the American Psychological Association, the Western Psychological Association and served as the Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations (with 1.5 million members). 

Zimbardo is currently an Emeritus Professor at Palo Alto University. He is also Emeritus Professor at Stanford University (professor since 1968) and taught previously at Yale, NYU, Columbia University, and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He has been given numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, and writer, for his service to the profession. His more than 300 professional publications and 50 books convey his research interests in the domain of social psychology. 

Zimbardo 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.

Most recently, Zimbardo launched the Heroic Imagination Project to pursue his vision of heroism as the antidote to evil. This vision came during the writing of his landmark, New York Times bestselling book, "The Lucifer Effect", and has held his focus for more than ten years.

Areas of Interest:

Prisons, time, shyness, madness, violence/evil, persuasion, hypnosis, dissonance, teaching, political psychology, terrorism