Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - The Psychology of Evil | Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus in psychology at Stanford University, and creator of The Stanford Prison Experiment.Philip has spent over 50 years teaching psychology - he’s an absolute legend in the field. He’s written more than 60 books and has over 600 publications (professional and popular articles, and chapters). Among his books are: Psychology and Life textbook, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, The Time Cure, and most recently, Man Interrupted. His current research looks at the Psychology of Heroism, asking: “What forces push some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of people in need.” As founder and president of the nonprofit foundation, Heroic Imagination Project (HIP), he does trainings globally in schools, institutions, and businesses. It would be impossible to cover all his work over the course of an hour conversation, but we discuss what gave him the idea to conduct The Stanford Prison Experiment and how that shaped some his future work which includes studying topics like: shyness, the conception of time, and heroism._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist, and I'm fortunate to work with some of the most extraordinary thinkers and doers across the planet. And the whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast, is to learn from people, to pull back the curtain, to explore how they've committed to mastering both their craft and their minds. Now, our minds are flat out our greatest asset. And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, it's just a quick little reminder right here to check out the online psychological training course, where we pulled together the best practices to meet that unique intersection of high performance and wellbeing.

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for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at psychology at Stanford University and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. So Dr. Zimbardo has spent over 50 years teaching psychology, and he's an absolute legend in the field. He's written more than 60 books and has over 600 publications, professional, popular articles, and chapters in books. A few of the books that you might recognize are Psychology and Life, that's a textbook, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, The Time paradox, the time cure, and most recently, man interrupted. His current research looks at the psychology of heroism, asking what forces push some people to

become perpetrators of evil while others act heroically on behalf of people in need. So as founder and president of the nonprofit foundation, Heroic Imagination Project, HIP, he does training globally in schools, institutions, and businesses. Now, it would be impossible to cover all of his work over the course of an hour conversation, but we discussed what gave him the idea to conduct the infamous Stanford prison experiment and how that shaped some of his future work, which includes studying topics like shyness, the conception of time, and heroism. And if you're not familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, I definitely want you to check that out. We give

some context to the experiment in the conversation, but it's important to understand the fullness of that. I'm so excited to introduce this conversation to you he's got a beautiful mind and he's really pushed on the edges of psychology he's been on public display and you know poked at and he's been he's got a lot of arrows and daggers in his back for sure but he's definitely changed the way we understand psychology and if you are familiar with his work I think you might walk away from this conversation just feeling a bit different about the man that you thought he was. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with the legend, Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo, how are you? I am fine. I'm delighted to be on your program, Michael.

I tell you what, I don't say this often, but there's been a handful of psychologists, you and Dr. Bendora, one of your colleagues, that I just feel like a kid in a candy store. So there's something about our science and our art that when I watch what you've done and I've learned from you from decades, that it is so disruptive and so innovative what you've created and added to the world of humanity that I just, it's hard to know exactly where to start, but I want to start with a compliment, which is thank you for what you've contributed to the field and humanity in general. You're welcome. That's a lovely compliment. Yeah. I mean, you are one of the legends in the field and, you know, you've captured an

incredibly interesting notion about time and heroism and the Lucifer effect, as well as probably the work that most general psychology students would recognize you from, which is the prison experiment. And so when you think about your body of work, how do you think about it? Well, I recently did a memoir. The Stanford Historical Society sent one of their members here and we did four two hour dialogues asking me about my earliest memories in life and what I was doing as a teenager on and on until the present day. What am I doing now? And what am I envisioning? And it's just been published, the memoirs, by a famous publisher in Florence, Italy, Junti. And it's now come out in Chinese, Italian, Polish,

and in English. And it's just a Zimbardo memoir. I don't have one right here, but to show you. Anyway, so I'm excited about the English version that I could share with friends and family. But in it, one of the things it said is, you know, it asked me, how come I've done so many different things that seem unconnected? I mean, the Stanford Prison Study and evil and my work in Abu Ghraib and prison, and then shyness and time perspective and now heroism.

And part my answer is I'm just really curious about human nature and that, you know, I ask, I keep asking myself a question. I wonder what would happen if, or I wonder why people did that, or what would happen if we change this element. So I just have this mind of an experimental social psychologist. And it's really wondering, I wonder what would happen if, or wonder why they did that the way they did that. And so I've been criticized as being not a generalist, but a jumping jack, jumping from one thing to another and back and forth. But it's really not. It's that my early work on the prison study came out of my interest in understanding the psychology of evil. How is it that good people do bad things? And so when I was

a kid, I was very, very religious, partly because I was born in poverty in the South Bronx ghetto, and there was evil all around of many different kinds. And so I was always, as a kid, able to step back, never get involved in gang stuff, never get involved in drugs that my friends were doing, and observed, you know, why did this good kid do this bad thing? And what do you have to do not to get engaged in involved in that thing? And it's never doing anything for easy money. The idea is money is something you have to work to get. So I worked hard all of my life. So now, in fact, on August 15th, 2021, is the 50th anniversary of the Stanford Prison Experiment. 50 years. Oh my goodness. It makes me feel both old and proud that this is probably the most famous slash infamous study in all of psychology.

Without a doubt. Were you friends? I think I read somewhere that you were friends with Milgram. Is that accurate? Yes, we were high school classmates. We were in the same class at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, New York, in 1949, 1950. We were together for two years in the class. And Milgram was the smartest kid in the class. He was just brilliant. But nobody liked him because he made everybody know that he was brilliant. And he won all the medals, you know, in science, in math, et cetera. But I was the most popular Broadway. Oh, you were.

Okay. I want to get to that in a second because it's not lost on me that there's a little bit of a epicenter between the two of you guys and all of the studies that have flowed from your relationship. And maybe if you could start with just a general, I'm sure you're fatigued by talking about, you know, the study, but the relationship between your study and Milgram and that relationship I'm fascinated by, because, and I'll tell you why the study in itself is innovative and disruptive,

but the epicenter piece is fascinating to me because we've got, now if you think about where brilliant ballet dancers come from, you think about where there's a hotbed for basketball, it's like Maryland or Virginia, you know? And so, you know, so I think about hotbeds and the two of you guys kind of cracked something open that was disruptive. So could you, would you mind starting with just the basic overview? Yeah. So, so Milgram, so we were, I met him 1949 and it's not that far from the end of the second world war. And Milgram was a little Jewish kid. I was a little Sicilian kid and Milgram. So we're high school kids. I mean, all you guys, all you want to do is have a good, great date on the weekend. And Milgram, on the other hand, was super serious.

He's always talking about, could the Holocaust happen again in America? Could he and his family end up in a concentration camp? And we're saying, Stanley, lighten up. And then he was saying, could it happen? I said, you know, I can remember saying to him, we're not that kind of people. We're not like the Germans. And then he said, quote, how do you know what you would do until you're in the same situation? So that's the mentality of a social psychologist as a high school kid,

you know, saying the situation is what matters. It's not what you think. It's not your personality. It's when you're in that situation, then let me see what you do or don't do. And so in high school, he was a situationist. And that's the link between him and his work and my work. So in 1962, he did the infamous obedience to authority study, which studies. He actually tested a thousand men in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale University is on the East Coast. Stanford is on the West Coast.

He tested a thousand men in 16 different variations. And the basic part of his study was two people came to the laboratory. They signed up to get, oh, I know, $5 for one hour, which in 62 is reasonable. But it was at Yale. So people did it because they wanted to be connected with Yale. If you're New Haven, Connecticut, Yale is all there is. And so they draw lots. And one of them is chosen to be the teacher. And the other one is chosen to be the learner. And the premise of the study is, know that if you reward uh positive outcomes learning improves but nobody has studied whether if you punish errors memory will also improve so that's what we're doing the teacher is going to give the learner something to learn when the

learner gets it gets it right he says good reward when a learner gets it wrong you give him a shock okay and the shock is on a is a big shock box with 30 switches starting with 15 volts and increasing in 15 volt increments but it's so it's 15 30 45 but then in the middle is 100 then it's 200 and 300 and then at the end is 450 volts um and so the question is, you know, and of course, once the shock gets really high, the learner who's in another room is yelling and screaming. And I should mention the learner was a confederate. He was really not getting hurt. So in a funny way, it's not unethical. Nobody was suffering, but the teacher believed that what he was doing was causing suffering. And what happened is that when Milgram described the study the way I am

to 40 psychiatrists at New Haven Medical School, he asked, what percentage of all Americans would go to 450 volts? And their combined average was 1%. They said only psychopaths would do that. And in fact, as everybody knows who knows psychology, the answer was not only wrong, it was so wrong that it was 65%. Two of every three people in his study went all the way. He also did one replication with women, and they behaved exactly like men. So his study laid the groundwork for the power of social situations to make good people do bad things. And there was an authority piece in that too, I think, right? Where there was a white coat that was also part of the study that said hey uh you you know you

should really that's the central part is the guy in the white lab coat i mean uh you know in those days uh well still today medical students uh medic people in medicine if you go to a hospital people in white lab coats so as the guy who was running the experiment was actually a biology, high school biology teacher. But it was the white lab coat, which was the symbol of authority. But also, but the guy in the white lab coat was the one to say, you must go on. You must shock more. You must shock higher. And what Milgram also always wanted to be a filmmaker. And later in his career, he made some interesting films. But he made a film of his experiment called Obedience. And it was one of

the first films ever made in psychology. But in that film is where you could see the suffering of the teacher saying to the experimenter, the authority, I don't want to go on. I don't want to hurt anybody. And the authority is saying, you must go on. You must continue. You have a role to play. You are the teacher. And so because the audience could see the suffering of the teacher. That's what Milgram's study was labeled as unethical early on, probably even before it was ever, no, certainly before he published a book called Obedience to Authority. And so when you saw that, well, first it's like, I mean, I'm trying to imagine, I want to know when you first read that study or became familiar with it, like what you uniquely did with it, but just cooking up that experiment, you know, requires some sort of stretching limits for sure. But I'm much more interested in what you did with when you heard about this study, I mean, I contacted Milgram. I was already at Stanford. But when I read that research, I said, you know, it's so rare that his situation is really unusual because you're sitting in front of a shock box, you're pressing a button, you know, you hear the learners screaming or or not um and you know and and and the authority saying you must go on you must go on i'm saying i don't see an analogy in the real world i mean uh we we all play

roles i mean um you could be a used car salesman and the boss says you got to sell sell everything on the lot even though you know a lot of them are junk cars. But you almost never have an authority there saying, go on, keep doing bad things, keep hurting people, et cetera. So I thought, I want to prove the power of the situation. But what I want to do is put people, we knew were ordinary good people who were intelligent. So they're all going to be college students, not just old men. And we're going to pre-test them to be sure they're physically, psychologically normal and healthy. And we want to put them in a situation where the roles are predetermined. Everyone knows what it means to a prisoner and guard if you are in a prison setting. So I said, my social situation, in a way, is more powerful than Milgram's because it's more, it links to things in the real world that everybody knows. We know, we've seen movies

about prison. We've read books about prison. And we know that in prison, there's three roles. There's a superintendent of the prison. No, there's a superintendent, the warden, guards, and prisoners. And the roles are really spelled out very clearly. And so that's what I did. I created a prison called, the study was the Stanford Prison Experiment. And what made it work was I persuaded local police chief to allow his offices to make a mock arrest. They actually went around to all the places we told uh would be uh prisoners to wait and then arrest them charge them with a crime bring them down to the palo alto police station and book them fingerprint them take a picture put them in this a real prison cell

uh put a blindfold on and then my graduate student, Craig Haney, would come, take them, drive them down to the basement of the psychology department, where we had created our prison yard. And then the study would begin. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn

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f-e-l-i-x-g-r-a-y.com. And use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. And I mean, talk about taking it to the next level. And you've had, I'm sure, some scar tissue around this. But when I think about it, I go, yep, that is how innovation works. And you push right up against the boundaries. And you had some really deep insights about humanity. And I see the thread, you know, between that and the Lucifer effect and time, the time

paradox, as well as the hero effect. I can see that string and I do want to get to that string. What were the big takeaways for you about your experiment? Yeah. So as anybody knows, so the other thing is I also made documentary videos, something called quiet rage because I wanted, but I wanted to distribute them to teachers to say, Hey, here's a, here's a followup of Milgram, but it has a better foundation because

Milgram's study lasted one hour. My prison experiment went day after day after day. Prisoners lived in their cells 24 hours a day. Guards worked eight-hour shifts. So it meant you really, you could see the evil developing in the guards day after day. You could see the prisoners resisting and then breaking down prison after prison. So that's what's unique about the study that people forget is that instead of being one hour as almost all psychological research is, it was a week-long experience for everybody, including the staff. So that's the first really big difference. And then, even though we had selected prisoners for everybody who was normal and healthy, in 36 hours, the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, Prisoner 8612 Doug Corpy and then there

after every single day there after another prison had a breakdown we had one Chinese student Glen Gee who had a full body rash so it was psychosomatic and had to be released so I ended the study after six days because it was out of control. I mean, prisoners were really, prisoners were suffering, but guards were becoming ever more creatively evil. And if you just stop and step back and say, suppose you were a kid, you're getting $15 a day to play a guard. You come in at, you know, 10 o'clock at night. You got to kill, you got to be there till six in the morning.

And what are you going to do? Well, you could sit in your guards office and play cards, or you could use your frizzes as your playthings. And that's what they did to amuse themselves. And the point is, once you did something, then you had to escalate. You had to do something more extreme, more unusual. And what we saw was the escalation of really evil inaction, creatively evil things that the guards thought of to do to the prisoners. And so when I read the study, I go, oh, that wouldn't be me.

But would it? Because it's the context and the situation that I would want to say, no, my character, my ethos, my, you know, first principles wouldn't, wouldn't show up that way. And, but then would it, you know, so I mean, I'd like to think, I think the numbers that you have is like 30% of folks are upstanders, that they'll actually say, hey, the first reaction of everybody should be, I would never do that, okay? But you're saying that being in a safe situation, being in your home environment or a school environment, and what you don't realize is when you are embedded

in a social situation and you're not alone, there is the staff who said, we hired you to be a prison guard, not somebody sitting around smoking a cigarette. The other guards on your shift are going to put pressure on you to say, come on, we're all in this together. And then you know what it means to be a prison guard in a prison, that, you know, prisoners are dangerous. In fact, on the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled, locked themselves in their cell, refused to come out, cursed the guards. And that's when the guards said, these are dangerous prisoners. So that redefines everything, is that they're not students playing the role of prisoner or guard. They are dangerous prisoners. And what do you do with dangerous prisoners? You have to dominate them. And that's what we saw emerging.

And then how do you tie that back to concentration camps, if at all? Yeah, well, Milgram did. I mean, Milgram has a film saying, you know, his study, which was considered unethical at the time, nevertheless gives insight into how easy it was for good Germans who were made into prison guards in Auschwitz prison and prisons around the world, literally, to do their thing. They say, I'm just playing my role. I'm just doing my job. And that, so you suspend your personal ego, your personal values, because now it's not you. It's not you, Michael Jervis. It's you, MJ, the guard. In that situation uh situation the higher ups say this is what you must do and you look around and your buddies are doing it and lo and behold it's a you're trapped in a in a in a conformity uh chasm uh and that that in most cases you give in um the um you learn how to adjust to every

situation whether the situation is good or bad um um i'm trying to remember there's a book about an old german uh old german man who were too old to fight in the war, who was sent to remote towns all over Poland to round up Jews and kill them. What happened is when they start out in the first town, when they round up Jews and the officer said, you know, you have to shoot them. Most of the men said, these are older men. These are like 30, 40, 40, 50 years old men. And they couldn't do that. Many of them are fathers, grandfathers. And they said they refused. However, a few of them did it. And then when they went to the next town, the ones who did it felt guilt and put pressure on their buddies to say, come on, we're in this together. And so in this book, it documents the increasing conformity, obedience of the German soldiers killing more and more and more Jews.

And finally, when they get to the last town on their path, then every one of them is killing, shooting Jews. So here's conformity to an evil norm. Okay. How do you take your insights there and your study of evil, the Lucifer effect, and how do you snap that onto the insurrection that happened on the Capitol just recently in the United States? So in a funny way, I hadn't thought about it. It's a great question, Michael. It really is the combination of Milgram's obedience to authority and zimbardo's uh social situational power the part that links to milgram is donald j trump

so donald j trump was a powerful authority he's the guy in the white lab coat uh who um uh in at one and one element he's a character, and there was cartoons about him. In another way, he's embodimentusion that he won the election, even though all the evidence was that he lost by a wide margin. He could not accept that. He's somebody who can't accept failure. He's always been domineering, number one. And so what was happening on January 7th was the Electoral College vote was really, you know, the official statement that, yes, Joe Biden won and Donald Trump lost. And for some bizarre reason, he thought if you could prevent that from happening, he might still win.

So it's all a delusion. And it's really a delusion almost of a person becoming a madman. And so essentially what he sent a message is we must stop the vote by all means necessary. And again, it's the Nazis. You know, we must destroy Jews by all means necessary. And so he gave his followers, and they're sad to say there are millions of them, a reason to go to the Capitol to stop the vote. Now, the Capitol is closed. So what happens is they have to get into the Capitol in order to stop the vote. So they break through.

And there's not a lot of resistance. There's not enough fleece there. They didn't expect such a riot. And then you have the riot mentality that is you're going from point A to point B, and anything in between is a barrier that must be removed, including human lives. So they are gassing and shooting, killing wounded policemen. And then you have the group, the group eruption, the excitement of being, being in a group.

It's, you know, kids playing, you know, cops and robbers. And, and then what we saw was he, Trump never, never, you have to stop. You have to go back. You know, he, he, I'm sure he never expected that kind of violence. But his saying we must stop the vote was what triggered the violence. And it was a disgrace, certainly a disgrace of Americans around America, around the world. Do you see his actions as evil or do you see the mob or the group's action as evil? Or do you see, and I'm using that word purposely, or do you rationalize it because you understand human nature in social context and say, no, it's actually been documented that this is

somewhat predictable when people are following leadership. No, no. Evil is anything which harms other people, harms, hurts, kills. So the situation that Trump ignited, that's what he did. He ignited the situation that it was evil because he was smart enough to know that bad things could happen, that he had to know that the Capitol Police had to resist this mob.

So what Trump did was really evil. And also what the mob did was evil. Because you know that you're trespassing on government property. You're breaking windows. You're tearing down the doors. And then once you get inside, then it's evil unloosed from its hinges. You begin to steal things from offices. It's like little kids.

Some of it looked like little kids, you know, in a jamboree. I mean, stealing things, robbing stuff. But then the other thing which was also horrible was the guy wearing a shirt about Auschwitz. Like, I forget what it was, but like Auschwitz is a prison ground, you know, denying or making light of the horrific murder of millions you know millions of jews and then somebody carrying a confederate flag you know that you know again saying that the south will rise again and that was that's been a theme in america forever um so so it's yes it qualifies for evil what trump did was surely evil what the mob did was surely evil and the good news we had there's not been a follow-up. They've identified 250 to 400 individuals who were documented as having broken the law, and they

will be brought to trial. When will those trials be? Where will they be? Where is that list of people? Yeah, amen to that. And when you roll that back just a little bit as a social scientist, one of the brightest in our field, how do you think about 2020? One of the great social experiments ever, in our lifetime at least, at mass, where people were battling for their livelihood, for their lifestyle. They were locked inside the social isolation, the physical isolation that was taking place and the financial fears that were looming. And so along with obviously the, the concerns for health. So when you put your lenses on 2020, how do you make sense of it? It's hard to make sense of it is that here is something, well, which has killed, you know,

550,000 American lives, 550,000 millions. It'll soon go to 3 million globally of lives lost since pandemic. But it's had the biggest impact on changing the quality of life of every person in every country around the world. So for many people, for one year, they were quarantined. They could not see their grandparents. They could not see the rest of their family.

They could not visit with relatives who were dying in the hospital, hospitals. But also it meant that people were now couldn't go to work. For most workers, part of your life is going to work, at work coming back from work and and so the link between home and work got broken down some people who were more educated they used that time to read to write to do zoom zoom calls with fellow workers but it also meant that there was a rise for young people. There's definitely been an increase in drug taking, drug overdoses increase. There's been an increase in spouse abuse. Couples who did not have a very good relationship before, but were only together a short time, now we're forced to interact with each other. So all the indications that I've seen

is that more bad has come out, more bad about human nature has come out from the pandemic than good has. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that.

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That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. What would you, if we could stitch two things together, your experiment, your first classic experiment, the PRISM study and the pandemic, if we could try to stitch these two together and both experiments, I mean, one was purposeful and the other was natural. Both experiments or both conditions revealed something about human nature and both revealed that we can get with this knowledge, we can get better, or we can just kind of explain things away and minimize, right? But

certainly from yours, but also from the pandemic, what would you say is the great takeaway from both, but in particular, looking through the lens of 2020? Yeah, I mean, partly it's the great news about human nature is adaptability. The reason we are here in 2020 after generations, we've had pandemics in 1918, we've had polio epidemic diseases. So the positive news about the pandemic

is the creation of vaccines. So this is part of the creative aspect of human nature. And then not only creating a vaccine, but be able to manufacture them. So here's, again, human ingenuity at work, and then being able to transport them to various sites, and then have healthcare workers working almost around the clock to give people vaccinations. So the positive part for me of the pandemic is looking at the creativity that it inspired in developing vaccine, in developing the transportation and delivery. And that is what's going to literally save us. The negative part is that for some people, they may never really fully recover. That is, during the time they were isolated, their relationship to their spouse, you know,

was terrible. Or in some cases, the relationship of parents to kids was terrible. But I hope in retrospect, the positives will outweigh the negatives. Yeah, my takeaway, there's so many, but my main takeaway is that it showed us that we weren't prepared to deal with both chronic and acute stress compounded together. And we were barely dealing with chronic stress as at least in the Western world prior to that and you know overall life vibrance was not at an all-time high because we are you know we're glorifying the work ethos and not really glorifying peace and fulfillment purpose and meaning and so I think what

it showed us is that we've got to get our psychology right to deal with stress better. And when I, psychology for me is just a loose word at this moment for our inner life and our skills to be able to deal with difficult environments and situations. Yeah. Again, I agree entirely with that, Michael, is that for some people, they realize I am more than my job. That is, you know, before you ask somebody, you know, hello, who are you? What do you do? I'm an accountant.

I'm a bookkeeper, et cetera, et cetera. And suddenly you realize, you know, the break between you and your home and your place of work. And that's going to change. I mean, many, many companies already are shutting down their offices permanently and you realize you could work from home. Now, when you choose to work from home rather than you're required to work from home, that's again an important concept. So for many people say, oh my God, I saved two hours a day commuting in traffic, which was always stressful.

And now I could be at home. I could be working. I have a cup of coffee at my computer. So for many people, the outcome is going to be very, very positive of this. And the future outcome is shutting down lots of big office offices where people would work in, in, in quote flocks. And, and now, but again, it's people who have access to the internet, access to zoom, access to meeting responding to one another, that, that,

that that's been able that for many people, it's been able to keep your family closer together and also workers, workers with one another. So I see that as a positive, a positive thing in the future. OK, so let's see if we can stitch this over to the time paradox for a minute is that, so I've got this idea that my part of my life purpose, or if not square right in the center of my life purpose is to help people live in the present moment more often. And I'm, I'm not lost on, there is a time and a place to think about the past and a time and a place to muse about the future. But my experience has been that time in the present moment is such a precious, fleeting, fragile experience that if we could buffer the skills to live there more often, we would experience truth more often. We'd experience high performance

more often. We'd experience wisdom more often. And so, anyways, that's coming from the influence of high performing, high stress environments, sport and otherwise. And the time paradox you introduce, is it six? Is it six different perspectives for time? And I'd love for you to just, I'd love to go through them a little bit. And if you could give a description of past positive Polly. Yeah. So essentially it's one of the things that came out of the prison, two things came out of the prison study is my research on shyness. And I am not a shy person.

I'm obviously, I've always been an extrovert. I've always been focused on helping other people enjoy life more fully and in the process, my enjoying life fully. But coming out of the study, I began to think about when talking to my students the next year at Stanford, of shyness as a self-imposed psychological prison. Now, unlike most other phenomena, nobody says you are a shy person. I say I am a shy person, and therefore, I can't raise my hand in class. I can't ask the boss to raise. I can't ask the girl for a date. So you limit

your freedom of association, your freedom of speech. And as the guard in you, you put the constraint on. You say, yeah, don't do it. People are going to laugh at you. You're going to fail. So using that metaphor, I began to study shyness. And starting in 1972, I was the first person, psychologist, to study shyness. And we did cross-cultural research, experimental research. And then I created a shyness clinic at Stanford, which is still working 50 years, 40 years later at Palo Alto University, in which we get 100% cure. What kind of therapy gets 100% cure? Very simple, by understanding what it means to be shy. It means three things.

One, you don't have the basic social skills, communication skills. Secondly, you say negative things about yourself. I'm too fat, I'm too ugly, I'm too dumb. And third is a physiological. I'm too fat. I'm too ugly. I'm too dumb. And third is a physiological. I blush. I get emotionally aroused. I can't function properly. So we have a treatment for each of those three things. We teach you social skills. We teach you cognitive behavior modification, and we teach you self-control and meditation. And when you do that, and we do our therapy only in groups

that we have been 100% successful. And I wrote a book called Shyness, What It Is, What To Do About It. Now, it was not a research paper. It was an ordinary, it was a trade book that 500,000 people or more used. So that I'm probably most proud of. Wow. Coming out of the prison study really unexpectedly. And then the second thing that came out was an interest in time because time was distorted in the prison study. No one was allowed to wear wristwatches.

There were no clocks. There were no windows. So you couldn't tell the time of day or night. And what you know is his guard ship one, his guard ship two, his guard ship three. And I actually never left the prison setting. I slept in my office at Stanford on the second floor so I could be called down when a prisoner broke down or when there was some emergency, when their parents day or a priest visiting day. And so time got distorted. And I began to think about time in my own life,

time as a kid, when you're a kid time stretches because what you're doing is playing. But when you're studying for an exam, time gets contracted. And so I began to think about time and I developed a scale called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI. And if you look at the time paradox, I think it's.org or.com, the scale is there and you can take it and score it. So what I came up with is the three obvious factors, past, present, and future. But each of those has a positive and negative component.

So for some people, when I say, when you think about your past, what comes to mind? For some people, it's the good old days, my best friends, all my successes, the good grades I got in school, the good girlfriend I had. For other people, it's the opposite. It's failure, rejection, abuse. And so we call those past positive versus past negative. For some people in the present, these are people who say, nothing I do ever makes a difference. I work hard and I still can't save any money. I try to be good to friends and family, but they don't accept me. And that is a sense of fatalism, that it doesn't even pay to try because nothing I do makes a difference. So that's present negative. Present hedonism is you always try. You always try something new.

You enjoy life fully. You live for the moment. And you make friends. You're funny. You're happy. So that's the positive side of present. Now Now in the future, education is the key to a positive future. In fact, we show that people who are more educated tend to be more future-oriented. You're always planning. You're not living for the moment. You're not hedonistic. You're planning, what do I have to do today to get tomorrow to be more successful? These are the people who invest wisely. These are the people who continue on. We get as much education as possible. These are the people who, if you are a performer, a ballet performer or a baseball player, basketball player, you put in a lot of time practicing. And so that's the positive side. The negative side of the future is what?

I might not succeed. I might put in all this time and all this effort, and I could fail. There's examples of people failing. So the future negative is anxiety about not succeeding. So each of them has a positive and negative. And there's a lot of research done now excuse me my my my original research uh and the book the time paradox that i did with my colleague john boyd has gone international uh people are doing research around the world on this topic and there's an international time perspective conference that meets every year,

every other year around the world in different countries, except for this year. And people share their ideas, share their research. Now, people are interested, not just psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, people in business, for all of whom time is critically important. And the last thing I'll mention is, what is ideal? Ideal is balanced time perspective, BTP. That means high on past positive, low on past negative. Moderately high on present hedonism, low on present fatalism, high on future orientation, positive, low on future orientation, negative. And that combination turns out to be, and a lot

of people have done research beside me, ideal for success in life, for enjoyment of life, for many, many, many good things. So I definitely run high on the future positive. So I took the safe route in many respects and probably like you, thought about the future, took the educational path. And looking through your lenses, it certainly was a way to quell some anxiousness, but it was also probably the thing that promoted anxiousness. And when my work with, you know, some of the best performers and athletes and executives in the world, they tend to run high on that future positive,

but there's an underlying anxiousness that, that is part of it. So what are some of the ways through, you know, that you recommend for folks so that they can take the good parts of thinking about the future in a positive way, but also work with the anxiousness that sits with it? A degree, a slight degree of apprehension is always valuable. You don't go where fools rush in. Okay. So, and so you realize that practice makes perfect, but excessive practice becomes an obsession. So, so essentially it's, how do you get

a true, a good fix on what, who am I? What do I want in life? How much effort do I have to put in at any one time in any one project? How do I balance the time? If I'm writing a new book, is that all I do in life? Well, I'm a father. I mean, I have to spend time with my kids. I have to spend time with my wife, having dinner together, talking about what she is doing. So the key is balance in life. It's that unless you live alone, unless you are, you know, kind of self-absorbed, which is never good, then it's really trying to understand how do I balance what I want, what I'm good at, what I like, what I want to be better at with who Phil

Zimbardo is as a social creature. So I have to make time in my schedule for a podcast with Michael Gervais. Well, if I'm spending an hour there, that's an hour I'm not spending preparing a new lecture that I have to give tomorrow at Stanford University, the Historical Society is going to present the 50th anniversary of the Sanford Prison Experiment. So then what I say is, well, the hour I spent with Michael, I'm going to have to make up by spending another hour tonight doing the thing I'm going to do tomorrow. So life is really a balancing your time allocation to get the best fit. And so I've been able to do that fairly well. Well, it's an obvious note to say thank you again for your time. And then, so can I ask you just a little bit about people's opinions and why do you think they matter so much as a social psychological scientist?

Why do people's opinions matter so much to others? Well, most of us want to be liked by other people. I mean, as little kids, you know, all little kids want to be popular. Popular means how many other little kids like you, minus how many other little kids ignore you or don't like you. And that goes on in life. As social beings, you know, we want to be, A, we want to be accepted, that we want to be recognized, we exist, we don't want to be ignored. And then you want to be liked, you want people to like you for good things about yourself, things that you work at. And on the other hand, not all of us are likable. Some of us have developed character, if you will, flaws that you might be dominant.

You might be somebody who, instead of asking for help, begs for help or yells for help or says, I don't need help. a positive social creature who knows how to interact and link with other people and actually invites other people to interact with them. And it's not a skill that you learn easily. It's not a skill that anybody teaches you. But to be, and it's funny, it's a kind of dynamic social creature. Dynamic is you're always changing, you're modifying your behavior based on the feedback you get from other people, based on the feedback you get from yourself. And again, one of the things in my Heroic Imagination Project, which is the thing I'm obsessed with currently for the past 10 years, is we teach people how to be sociocentric. The enemy of heroism is egocentrism. It can't be about I, it has to be about we.

So we encourage people, especially young people, when I give online lectures these days, virtual lectures to high school, college kids, And I say, your job in life is to make someone else feel accepted, feel respected, feel that their identity matters. How do you do that? You always ask people their name, you give your name, you shake hands or do elbow bob, whatever. And then you give them a compliment. And the compliment can begin with external things about them. What an interesting scarf you have. What an interesting, curious eyeglasses or sunglasses.

And then you go from the external to the internal and say, God, I really liked the way you phrased that question. Or that was really funny. I mean, you make me laugh. So you give compliments about the external aspect of people, and then internal, their thoughts, their feelings, etc. And in doing so, giving compliments is a rare skill that is a skill that is rarely practiced. People don't give compliments as often as they should. I taught at Stanford for 40 years and I was a really good teacher. I taught classes of up to a thousand kids.

I devoted my life to teaching, meaning I never gave the same lecture once, even in introductory psych. I always thought of new things, new dimensions. And I would make my lectures exhilarating. That was the goal, not just to be good. And every once in a while, 30 years later, 40 years later, somebody will write to me, say, I was a student in your class in 1982. It changed my life on and on. And I would write back and say, aren't you glad I didn't die before you sent me that compliment? Why did you wait 30 years? Why didn't you tell me in 1982,

92 or 202? But again, it's just think about, I want your audience to think about that is how rarely we give compliments and how much we like to receive a compliment. And so I'd like your audience to say, starting today, I'm going to start giving compliments. And you give compliments at home. You thank your mother for the dinner. You thank your wife for having done something special. So that you don't take, compliments mean you don't take for granted the actions of some other person, that nobody has to do the things for you that they do. And so again, it's being a person who appreciates what other people do,

especially when they do it for you. So this is maybe an extension to gratitude training. So gratitude training is becoming more aware of what you're grateful of. And then this is the expression of it, the gratitude, both external and internal that you're seeing for others. And so this is, if I play this back correctly, you're suggesting this is an inoculation to egocentrism and potentially a proponent of heroism, a training mechanism for people to be more heroic because if they're focused on others and practicing focusing on the wellness of others, that maybe in a time of need, we will express ourselves more as a hero to quote unquote, as opposed to a selfish fill in the blanks.

You hit it exactly, Michael, is that we should be grateful for what we have. We should be grateful for what other people give us. That gives us a positive inner feeling. But how do the people know that we appreciate what they did for us unless we express it? Now, sometimes you express it with a smile and nod of your head, but give it words, give it meaning to say, I thank you for such and such. I appreciate how you did this. I value you. People don't say that. And for me, that is what creates this meaningful social bond. And I say it starts within a family. It starts within your nuclear family, your expanded family,

you and your neighbors, you and your friends, you and your buddies, you and your classmates. So it should be a series of circles of grateful expression. And the same way you hope that if you do it, it'll come back to you to say, Michael, I really appreciate how you orchestrated this program that I find it really, you made it interesting for me, whereas normally this is kind of boring. Just repeat, tell me about A, tell me about B, tell me about C. So in fact, Michael Jervis has made this hour more interesting for me. And I value that.

And I thank you. Yeah, I'm going to run with that maybe for the rest of my life. So, and I want to honor your time and I want to share a quick story. And then I've got just a few more questions for you is that I was close to this. I didn't say it as eloquently as you did about compliments, but I would ask athletes to go into a public setting and with all the right benevolence, give a compliment to somebody. Oh, you did? Yeah. So this was probably about 15 years ago that I started this because I wanted to help them

with vulnerability because I think everything that I was looking for to help an athlete be in the present moment more often, experience vulnerability so that they could express a moment of social courage. And then that courage can be used in other arenas in their life as well. And I would ask them to give a compliment. And what I found, and I think this is going to go right to some of your work with males, is that they could do it much easier. They could give a compliment to another male much easier.

So then I watched that. And first of all, they would come back after I'd given this challenge and say, right, go do this for the next seven days, give a compliment. And I'd say three compliments a day. And they would come back and they would say, right, that was hard. But I did it with a couple of guys. I said, okay, well, let's think about the other gender. And I'll tell you where I got in trouble with it in a minute. And so they were coming back and they're like, man, I was a wreck. And I said, okay. And I'll tell you where I got in trouble with it in a minute. And so they were coming back. They're like, man, I was a wreck. And I said, okay foot three, six foot six, you know, grown alpha looking men as vulnerable and scared as you can to give a compliment to somebody.

And what I didn't realize because I was, it was coming from a benevolent place is that there might've been some intimidation that could happen from the woman's perspective. Like this man coming up to me, giving me this random compliment that there's so much social stigma around that it feels more like a predator experience or something that is threatening. And so I've pulled back from it because I don't want that. That was never the intent. But the beauty in exchanging a moment of vulnerability and kindness and compliment, I think there know so uh socially um perceived as predatorial because that was not the ever the intent so um yeah I just want to share that with you like yeah maybe that is the one concern is that how does the recipient know that my compliment is uh does not have a

hidden meaning that is you know i'm not i'm not complimenting you because i want to get a date or not complimenting you because i want you to do me a favor in turn. So it seems to me that it's by practicing often enough, it becomes a habit. That's what you want. Compliment is not some rare thing that you do on the, on the rare circuit. That's right. Something you do. And, and it's, it's, and you, you do it. I'm saying you do it with everyone, even if, now, I started this when I was a little kid. I, I was quarantined I was in a hospital filled with hundreds and hundreds of little kids, ages two to 16, who had contagious diseases.

And in 1939, there was no sulfa drugs and no penicillin. So that means there was no treatment. It means that every day, many, many kids died. And my only link to reality was the nurses. And I learned very quickly to give compliments. I was five and a half, I was there for, I went in for Thanksgiving, I came out for Easter. I was there almost six months.

I learned to give compliments to the nurses, to say, many of them, they always wore masks. And I would always say as a little kid, oh, I like your eyes. You have such beautiful eyes, you know, or beautiful hair. So as a little kid, now they knew I was not making out with them. They knew there was nothing special. Maybe they would give me an extra dessert or something. But it just was intuitive that I wanted them to take care of me. I wanted them to identify me as different from the other 200 kids so that if I had a need, they would be more likely to come during the night if I pressed the bell for something. So giving compliments has been part of my makeup. It's what you do routinely.

As a teacher, I would give compliments to students who asked a good question and gave a good answer. So students ask a question in class. Before I answer the question, I'd say, that's really a good question. It makes me think in a way I hadn't thought about, you know, the law of effect or Pavlov or whatever it is. question, I'd say, that's really a good question. It makes me think in a way I hadn't thought about, you know, the law of effect or Pavlov or whatever it is. So that's what I'm telling your guests.

Practice giving compliments. They could start with innocent, innocent ones. Start with people in your family, your friend circle and and if people think there's anything suspicious about them just tell them no you know I really want you to know that this is how I feel this is this is why I enjoy being with you working with you have you done any research around that to see if there's some sort of magical number I don't expect there is where we start to see some psychological or neurochemistry exchange that takes place for people that provides a net positive for them. And I don't imagine there is,

but I'm wondering if there's any research you've done around it. I don't think there's any research on compliment giving. But again, young psychologists out there make that a project. Yeah. At scale would be phenomenal. And then so complimenting was one of your survival tactics, but I've also read that imagination and prayer were also part of what you attribute to getting out of that one of the most sterile conditions you could imagine as a

five-year-old? And I mean, sterile from a psychosocial standpoint. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So in quote, I was advanced for my age. Partly I had two younger brothers and later younger sister. And my mother would always say my job was like to be like the father of these kids to take care of them and so i would always invent games we would play we were really poor and so we didn't have things so i would make up imaginary games and as a kid in the hospital i would do that again to the you know so for example i'd say you know uh who wants to play a game? Who wants to play exploration? And the kids around would say, yeah, yeah. And then I would say, okay, we're going down the Nile searching for a white

alligator. I think I had read that someplace. Maybe it was a comic book or something. And I'd say, you be the lookout, you do that. And so for one hour or so, we would lighten up the environment where kids are dying all the time and give them a focus. It also meant that I was practicing another issue of leadership skills, that the leader is somebody who initiates a program, an idea, a set of actions. And then soon after, kids would say, hey, Z, what should we do today? And that sharpens up that people need leaders to give them ideas or actions that make life better. And then, of course, given that kids would die all the time,

like you wake up in the morning and say to the nurse, nurse Mary, where's little Billy? He went home. Where's Jane? She went home. And then curiously, there was a conspiracy of denial. We all knew that going home meant they died, but it's what you wanted most in life is to go home.

So at night I would pray to God, let me go home that way, not this way. And then when I woke up in the morning, I'd say, thank you, God, for giving me another, literally, you're praying for another day of life. As a Sicilian, so I've got some family Sicilian roots as well. I imagine that the church was an important part of your foundation. But that's a guess. I haven't heard you talk about that.

Yeah, no, it was, my family was not religious, but coming out of the hospital, I became religious. I would bring my brothers, I had two younger brothers and sisters. I would bring them all to church, to mass. And I was religious through college and high school. I even saw when I was at Brooklyn College, I was the captain of the track team

and I just popped up a picture of the track team and at Brooklyn College, 80 or 90% of the kids then were Jewish and I had a cross. I didn't remember, I was wearing a necklace with a cross on it. So at least through college, I maintain a religious orientation. How do you finish this thought? People are fundamentally good when they are in a goodness engendering situation.

I mean, there's so much left to that. That's great. You know, so people are, would you say people are blank slate more than they are inherently good or inherently evil? Well, I want to believe they're, I don't believe anybody's inherently evil. I believe people are inherently good or inherently evil well i i want to believe they're inherent i don't believe anybody's inherently evil i believe people are inherently good uh and until they get put in a

bad barrel uh and um and there are a lot of bad barrels a lot of jobs that we take uh encourage encourage us to cheat, to lie. If you're an old-fashioned used car salesman that had to sell clunkers, that was your job. If you're a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you're dominating them, you'll shoot to kill,

then that's the image. But I believe in the goodness of human nature and it's being put into situations that corrupts that. And poverty is a situation that corrupts that. And poverty is a situation that corrupts that. Living in a war zone. I mean, there's never been, I think, I think in the past 200 years, there's never been one year where there's not been a war somewhere in the world. So wars are, for me, evil. Wars are designed for one group to try to dominate another group. And dominate means destroy. Jeez. Your life work and your life has been remarkable. And so as a contributor to so many psychologists and the people that they touch,

how do you think about the path of mastery? Do you see yourself on the path and like, how do you think about it in general? I mean, I don't see my life as a path. I see it. I get an idea and say, let me follow that.

I get another idea. It might be a little bit of link. So I don't see myself as going this way. You know, so it's really, it's really lights all around or stars all around or because I'm always looking for something, a new idea, something that will excite my imagination. And then how do I change that imagination into words and words into deeds and deeds into ideally experiments that have results that I can share? That's so clear. I mean, you are in many respects an emblem for psychological agility. How would you help others be agile? Yeah, how would you help some folks do that?

I don't know how you do that. Well, as I was saying that, learning to juggle, which I didn't do. I mean, people have said learning to juggle objects balls in the air is is one way to learn to have confidence that at first you know it falls the point is you begin by saying i will do this until i can keep both balls in the air at the same time. And then you add a third, you see. And then you can, even if you juggle three balls at a time, you begin to have self-confidence that is, here's something I can control, something that's not in me, it's something out there. And then you take a risk and add a fourth one.

And then it may even be, ideally, we don't do this, juggling in pairs. You're doing two balls and somebody else, and then you're throwing one to the other, he's throwing one to you. That's something I just thought about on the moment. It would build, certainly, a way to build a sense of mastery. Mastery for me is doing something that you've never done before. So it's not like you're just building on some old habits and skills. Oh my, what a treat.

Thank you for your time. Thank you for sharing. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. And yeah, so thank you so much for all your contributions. And this hour has been, I've been a kid in a candy store. So thank you again. Yeah, the last thing is, have your listeners go on. My hip project, Heroic Imagination Project, is something I've been doing for the past 10 years and now we're being revived. We just coalesced with another group called the Heroic

Construction Company. They had been working more with younger kids. My program, I developed lessons on, for example, how to transform passive bystanders into active heroes, how to transform prejudice and discrimination into understanding and acceptance of others who are different, and similar lessons. And we license these lessons for a small fee to schools, to businesses. And so if you just go online, Heroic Imagination, I think it's just project.org. And you could contact us if you're interested in having a trial lesson. And then what we do is we send either me or one of our people that I've trained,

we send to the school, to the business, to train your trainers. And so it's been very effective. We are in a dozen countries literally around the world. And in Hungary, which has this right-wing dictator president, that we are in every high school in all of Hungary, because I work really closely with them. And before the pandemic, I would literally visit Budapest every year. Ah, the Heroic Imagination Project. And it's online. It's a nonprofit research and education based.

I mean, it's extraordinary what you're doing. And so I definitely want to support people to go there. And if you could add one thing, one thing that you would like people to do on top of compliment giving, what would that one thing be? Oh, God. Maybe it's a practice. Maybe it's something that you do on a regular basis that has helped you be the man that you are.

Okay. In San Francisco, which I love, this is where I live. I grew up in New York. I live in San Francisco, which I love, this is where I live, all my, I grew up in New York, I live in San Francisco. One of the problems we have that people have in many places is increased number of homeless people. And and so and all the neighbors say it's a blight, you know, people living on the street, sometimes whole families. And so what I do is, first of all,

I changed the definition. They're not homeless people. They are people without a home. That's really a critical difference. Once you categorize people as, you know, in a negative way, homeless people is negative, but there are people who don't have a home. So you could not have a home. Your home could burn down in a fire and suddenly you are a person without a home. And so when I go downtown to buy something, when I could go downtown, I would always imagine in advance, I would take, let's say, $2, and I would see a homeless person, typically an older person, and I would go over to them and say, hello, my name is Philip Zimbardo. What is your name? And I put out my hand and then they would shake hands and they'd tell me their

name. And I said, do you live, did you come from San Francisco? What city did you come in? They tell me. And then I say, here's a dollar. I wish it could be more. I hope your luck improves. In every case, they begin to tear up because no one has treated them like a person rather than as a beggar. And so it's a little thing. I mean, so it doesn't change the homeless problem, but it's having an impact on one or two people each day in this really very positive way. So that's why I would encourage your business. You know, I never would have imagined your depth of intimacy, your availability to share from a vulnerable place about what matters most to you. I know you as having a big

mind, big imagination, pushing limits, you know, great writer and, um, you know, like a, a paragon in the field of research. And so, uh, I appreciate this other side, this openness, this curiosity, this deep imagination that you've trained, um, as well as like a very clear line of thinking that has made sense for you in your life. And so again, beautiful. Thank you. I always like to say goodbye. Thank you, Michael, for a wonderful hour.

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