Speaking of Psychology - Philip Zimbardo, PhD, on Heroism, Shyness and the Stanford Prison Experiment (SOP69)

Episode Date: December 5, 2018

Philip Zimbardo, PhD, is one of the most recognizable names in the field of psychology. In this episode, Zimbardo discusses recent criticism of his controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment as well as his other work on time, shyness, men and heroism. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, perhaps most well known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Over his 60-decade career, Dr. Zimbardo has done research, written books, and given TED Talks on a wide variety of topics, including evil, time, men's health, and shyness. Welcome, Dr. Zimbardo. Thank you. Great to be here with you. And so now you're in a new venture called the Heroic Imagination Project,

which inspires everyday heroism. Can you talk about that premise and explain how you train to be heroes? Yes. I would like everybody in the world to be a hero in training. And the idea was that after I did the Stanford Prison Study, which really in 1971, which is really a follow-up of the early work by Stanley Milgram. And many people don't know that little Stanley and I were in the same high school class at James Unrow High School in the Bronx in the 50s. But his research showed how easy it is for good people to violate their conscience

and harm another person at the request of an authority. I wanted to expand that to say, you know, more evil happens when people are playing roles, but nobody tells you to do anything wrong, but in that role, it becomes what you do. So if you're a prison guard, your job is to suppress prison riots. Your job is to dominate, control prisoners. And so there was a body of research now in social psychology. Milgram's study, my study, studied by my colleague Albert Bandura, to show how easy it is for good people to dehumanize others to steal to lie to cheat and harm other people and

then in 2007 I think I gave a TED talk I think was 2007 and it was on the psychology of evil It was one of the most popular talks of how many millions of people have seen it but at the end of the talk I said I raised the concerns issue of we now know how easy it is for good people to be seduced into doing evil. But I said to the audience, do you think it's possible that we can inspire and even train ordinary people to become heroes? And it hit a responsive court. And that's, I had, I just wanted to have a dramatic ending to the talk. Many people in the audience came up, including Al Gore, Pierre Omidyar, the person started

eBay. hey, you have to follow this up. I said, what do you mean? You have to have a foundation. You have to have a team. So I did. So in 2010, I organized in San Francisco, the heroic imagination project.

It's a nonprofit foundation in which what I've tried to do is to use basic knowledge in psychology, social psychology, cognitive psychology, as a training platform. So we want to inspire people, you know, meaning you should become a hero, you should do good,

but it's a different kind of hero. It's not military, it's not political. It's ordinary people, especially youth, doing daily deeds of goodness and kindness. And we teach you how to do it based on fundamental principles in psychology. And what are some of those success stories you've seen? I mean, some success stories you've had. Oh, so essentially, so we have these lessons that I've created

on how to transform passive bystanders into active heroes. Using all the research we know about from Dali and Latinae from the bystand effect. Using research from Carol Dweck, my colleague at Stanford, on how to transform people of a narrow, fixed, static mindset into a dynamic growth mindset. How to transform stereotype, prejudice, discrimination into understanding and acceptance of others who are different. So we have a number of these lessons. Each lesson is like three hours long. They're filled with provocative videos.

And I and some of my team, we go around the world training teachers, training people in human relations, how to deliver these lessons effectively. And so the lessons are licensed for a relatively small fee to schools, school districts, prison setups or HR organizations within business. And our most, so we're now a dozen countries literally globally around the world. And it's our most successful program, surprisingly, is in Hungary. And in Hungary they found, have a foundation called Hero Square. And I'm on the board of directors.

And what's astounding was I gave a talk there four years ago about this. At the end, several people came up and said, it's really interesting. Hungarians are the most pessimistic people in the world. So as soon as you say something new, they say, it won't work here. And I said, give me a chance. It's a challenge. So the next day, I actually did a workshop in a training, and now it's the most successful program in the whole world, meaning our program is in more than a thousand high schools,

in many, many businesses. What we do is often videotape and presented on... Hungarian TV, what would you do? So we reenact, you know, people lying on the ground and seeing who comes to help and who does it. And so that's our model program. But we're in Poland, we're in Bali, we're in Geelong, Australia, in Iran. We're in, I started a program in Tehran in Iran. Let's see, I'm about to go to Portugal, set up a program there. But it's really exciting for me to me to see this emerging. Curiously, since we're now an APA in San Francisco,

our program is almost nonexistent in San Francisco, where I live. And partly because the head of school districts say we don't have time in our curriculum to add this. It seems interesting and important, but our students have all of their curriculum totally planned for them. And I say, you know what?

that's really sad. If you can't work this in, it could even be obviously in an after-school program. So that's your next step is to, in your own backyard. Yeah, I mean, you have to make it work here as well. So I gave a talk this morning about the Hero Project. And people said, we want your program in Kenya. We want your program in Armenia for many different places.

In Guatemala, you know, but nobody came up and said, we'd like to have your program here. So it's a paradox. I want to touch back on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Yeah. So I have a brief synopsis for those who might not be familiar. But it was in 1971 at Stanford University. There was nine men who were volunteers.

So they were either the guards or the prisoners. And it was supposed to go for two weeks, but... Nine men guards and nine men prisoners. Okay, so 18. Yeah. And it was supposed to go for two weeks, but it ended, was cut short because essentially you were seeing that the guards are becoming psychologically abusive to the prisoners.

And that study has been used to explain human rights abuses from the Vietnam War to Holocaust and a variety of atrocities that have happened. But there has been criticism, and you've addressed that over the years. And most recently, there's been new criticism by the guards saying they were coached and one man said he faked a breakdown so he could study for his graduate exam. So what is your response to that?

Yeah, so the state prison study has become maybe the most iconic, widely known, study in psychology, literally around the world. And the problem has been, from the very beginning, I said, this is really, it should not have been called Stav Prison Experiment, should have been called the Stambert Prison Exploration. It's really exploring the boundaries of human nature.

And so the terrible thing was, so in our study, we actually recruited 24 college students from all over America. They were not from Stanford. We did it at Stanford. And we gave them personality tests, clinical interviews. And we picked two dozen who at the beginning were the most psychologically healthy and normal. And then we randomly assigned half to be guards, half to be prisons. So we had nine prisoners, three in each of three cells, and nine guards, each of which worked eight hour shifts. And then we had backup prisoners and guards. And so again, at the beginning, there was no difference between a prison guard and again it's 1971 what does that mean you're in the

middle of the Vietnam War students college students everywhere hate the police hate prison guards because when students protested against the war everywhere including a Stanford and I led some of those protests the administration often called the cops onto the campus and there were physical confrontations and And in some places like Ken State, Ohio, the National Guard actually killed students. So nobody wanted to be a guard. Now there's a movie, there's a Hollywood movie called the Stanford Prison Experiment, which just came out.

And at the beginning of the movie, it looks as it my staff is asking each of the people, do you want to be a prison guard, nobody wants to see a guard. Nobody likes guards. But what it meant was you had to be a guard. Everybody knew it was an experiment. You sign informed consent. And then the guards, we went with the guards, they picked out to Army Navy store the uniform.

So they're all now in military uniforms, which they hate the military, they hate cops. So they felt awkward. The prisoners were dehumanized. They were just in smocks with a number, and they became the number. And so on day one, nothing happened. In fact, what happened, one of the things

happened was you can hear so we made we have 12 14 hours of audio tapes of everything that happened and you can hear the guard saying come on guys let's take this seriously and i'm i'm looking i said oh my god this is not going to work i mean it's you know and um and then in fact uh the war so i played the role of superintendent and undergraduate david jaffy played the role of warden and i had two graduate students craig hayd and kirk banks who are my lieutenants But most of the time it was just guards and prisoners on the yard and we were looking in and making videos. And what happens is at one point, you know, there's, so there's three guards on this shift

and you know, two of the guards are telling the prisoners do push-ups, count off your numbers, and one of the guards are sitting in the court of smoking a cigarette. So David Jaffe goes to him and says, come on, you're getting 15 bucks a day, you've got to do something. No, why don't you act as if you're a tough guard? And we have, now everything we did is on audio, tape, videotape, and everything we did is in the archives not only of Stanford, but Akron University Psychology Museum. So now recently, the study has come under attack by a number of bloggers in medium, in

Vox in other places. And they say they have unearthed from what I'm a lot of it. I made available, you know, so I made available 44 boxes of every, every bit of information from the study, all the diaries, the observations, etc. They uncovered that the guards were told to be abusive to the prisoners. And so it's not that playing a role did it, they were told to do it. What we show is the warden told one guard and only one guard, and only one guard, that he should be tough. Being tough did not translate into what the guards ultimately did,

including having prisoners simulate sodomy, which is similar to what happened later in Abu Ghraib where American prison guards had Iraqi prisoners simulate fallatio. So telling one, so I'm saying, the criticism is the guards were told to be abusive. Only one guard was told to be tough, and he's on one shift. So the guards on the other shift didn't even know that. But then there's other criticisms that I went through each criticism.

So one of the blogs said that the first prisoner to break down in 36 hours, prisoner 8612, Doug Corby, he recently told them that he was faking it. Doug Corby is really an interesting person. In my book, The Looser Effect, I have a whole second. about him. He said he was faking it. Ultimately, he said he was not faking it. He keeps changing his stories. Partly he was embarrassed. He was ashamed of losing control. And we went back and found the original video we made of him in which he's telling a student, I was never so upset in my whole life. I lost control of my feelings and of the situation. That's him saying it. You know,

That was 14 years after the study. And now he's reversing his story. So I went through each of the criticisms, and we have online, I hope your viewers will go there. I wrote a 22-page detail response, not a rebuttal for each of the criticism. And I say here's the evidence. Oh, so for example, they said,

Carlo Prescott, an African-American ex-convict, who was my consultant, for the study, wrote an article in Stanford Daily saying it was all a lie. Carla Prescott never wrote that. Somebody else wrote it and put his name in. Carla Prescott doesn't type. He doesn't have a typewriter. And so we put online, we had made an audio of Carla Prescott saying two weeks ago, I didn't write a word of it. I know who did it. I don't want to mention his name, but I will if need be. He said, and Zimbardo is my buddy. We're blood brunties. I would never do that. So if you go online it's prison exp.org it's prison experiment.org slash hashtag links response singular and

there we have all the criticism and rebuttal so and as far as I'm concerned it's now settled well keeping this all in context what and many years later what do you think what are the the truths about human nature that you think your experiment highlighted um I see it as not negative. I see it as human nature is incredibly pliable, flexible. And that what it really says is we underestimate the extent to which our behavior is influenced by the situation, what other people are doing and saying how we're dressed, what the ambience is, whether it's a professional thing, whether it's a rock, rock party, whatever.

And situations can push good people. to do bad things, but now the Heroku Imagination Project says, let's work to create positive situations which bring out the best in us. So the idea is people can be good or bad, you know, devils or angels, and all we're saying is we have to be more aware of the power of social situations to shape us and then invest in having better schools, better, better social welfare programs that bring out the best and people and suppress the worst. And if you were to conduct this experiment today, would you do anything differently? Oh, sure. Okay, the problem now is the study can never be replicated. Because once it was over,

now we should say, even though it was 1971, Stanford University was one of the first universities to have a human subjects review committee. So they reviewed the study and they had some limitation of things we had to do, which we did. But again, it's kids playing cops and robbers. And everybody knew as a study. Everybody signed a statement. I'm going to be a prisoner or a guard. If I'm a prison, there'll be some stress, minimal diet.

So everybody knew it was an experiment. And so the human subject committee said they knew it's an experiment. It's in Stanford. What could go wrong? They like I underestimated. how powerful that situation can become. And within 36 hours, it became a prison run by psychologists. No one used the word experiment.

So for example, we said in the thing, at any time, if anybody says, if anybody says, I quit the experiment, I would release them. Nobody said that. They said, I want to see a lawyer. I want my mother. I want a doctor. You know, and so I insisted they had to use.

that phrase before that but it didn't become an experiment in there in anybody's mind after after the first day and so what we would do for example what would happen if was all women that's what I thought about immediately what would happen was all minorities would it be different if there was older people more wise than than college students so there are a lot of interesting things that would be interesting for us to know but we can we can never know that again And moving on to another topic you've done a TED talk on was about time. And in that talk, you spoke about how is humans we either live in the past, present, or future.

And you talked about the negative aspects of all three of those things. And you said the most optimal way of being is to be in all three realms but focusing on the positive. Can you explain that all the more? So one of the things that came, two things that came out of the prison study, which have shaped a lot of my life was because there were no clocks, There were no windows. So we all lost track of time. That is, you know, I lived in my office upstairs.

I would come down for extended periods. The guards worked eight hour shifts. They went home, came back to prisoners live there all the time. But when we were there, we lost track of time. Because when the guards were on, they were doing all kinds of stuff, you know, making the prisoners jump up and down and do counts and things.

And so I became aware, to all of the guards, as this is going on, about the psychology of time, how time is not an objective, there's objective time, but there's also subjective time. I began to think about it and do literature search. And then I realized that one aspect of time is our sense of time perspective. That is we live in the past, present or future. So right now, as we're talking, this, we're talking, This is the present. When we were setting up, that's the past. What we're going to do at the end of this is the future.

And thinking about it, I realized that there was very little literature on the psychology of time perspective. And I developed a scale called the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI, published in a journal of Personatic Social Psychology in 1999. Then I wrote a book, The Time Paradox. And what we say is that we all live in different time zones at different time. And there's two ways to live in the present, two in the past, two in the future. One is positive, one is negative.

So in our scale, we say, you know, when you think about your past, what comes to mind? For some people, it's success, happiness, birthday parties, graduation, rather it's abuse, neglect, missed opportunities. So then we can identify people who are past negative or past positive. When we talk about the future, some people say, the future is the key to success in life, to be educated, not to do rash, make rash decisions, always think about the consequence of your action.

On the other hand, for some people, when they think about the future's filled with anxiety, will I be able to succeed? Will I be able to find a wonderful wife? Will I be able to get a good job? So the future can be positive for some and negative. And then the present, what we discovered, is there people who are present,

fatalistic they say doesn't pay the plan my life is controlled by forces outside of me this is true a poor people people who certain religion another way to be present oriented is the present hedonistic meaning you live for the moment you live for excitement you live for sensation live for novelty these people get addicted because you always want something exciting and new so do you think you still the optimal way of being is to be in any of those realms but be focusing on the positive aspect yeah so The optimal, and we have a lot of now research, it's called having a balanced time perspective,

which means low on past negative, low on future negative, low on present fatalism, moderate on present hedonism. Present hedonism is exciting when it's not in the extreme and moderately high on future. So there's a balanced time perspective. And if you look at our scale, so my scale has like 56 items. There's also a short form. I think we just go time paradox.org. The scale is available to take and you get scored. But people have balanced time perspective, BTP.

We show in many, many realms, they have better self-esteem, more successful in life, even physically psychologically healthier. And in many ways, this is the ideal in life. And then we teach you how to develop that, how to lower the negatives and promote the positives. Your research is also focused on men. And in your TED talk in a book, I was talking about how men had fallen behind women

and achievements and social success. Can you talk about what your motivations behind this research was and what advice do you have for men? Yeah. So the most recent thing I've been doing is focusing on why young men around the world, including America, are failing, academically, socially and sexually. And I got interested in, I'm not a game player in general. I'm certainly not a video game player, but I had students at Stanford,

had my son Adam, were addicted to video games. And in those days, you put a quarter in a machine and you work some switch. And now the video game is right here. It's with you all the time. And there are people who now play, not people, men mostly, it's like 90% of men, 10% of women, are addicted to video games. What does addicted mean? They play 10 or more hours every night. Okay? And if you're doing that, what are you not doing? You're not exercising. You're not taking time out to eat. You're not doing your homework. You're not doing anything creative. You're not taking hikes. If you're on sports teams, you give that up, you don't have time for friends or girlfriends.

And then what's happened now in the last few years, suddenly here's online free pornography, which, you know, as an old-timer, you had to go to a dingy penny arcade, put a quarter in a machine to watch a black-and-white, you know, French pornography film. And now you press a button, and there it is. And so now what we're seeing is young men with a double addiction, addiction to video games, addiction to pornography. And again, what I say throughout is there's nothing wrong with either. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not pejorative.

It's only when it's done in social isolation, meaning you're giving up friends, and it's done in excess. Because in excess means it's whole realms of your life that you are giving up. And so a lot of evidence is meant out failing in high school. They're dropping out of school as soon as they can. They're dropping out of even college. They're giving up girlfriends. And they live in this world where on the video games, they dominate.

They control the enemy in World of Warcraft. In pornography, there's these beautiful, stunning, naked women who pretend they want to make love to you and it's only going to cost you a dollar a minute, you know. So it's free. Once you get in it, then you become hooked. Now, on the other side, so I wrote a book about why young men are struggling, why young men are failing. The interesting thing is women are succeeding better than ever.

Not because men are failing, but women are simply working hard. Women are doing all the things men used to do, but they're doing it better, better, smarter, why is it? So last year, around the world, women got more of every advanced degree. bachelor's degree, master, PhD, law, and even engineering. Now there's still a glass ceiling where there's some men at the top that, you know, keep keeping the power brokers, but I think that glass ceiling is going to be broken soon, hopefully.

And so you've had a long in-story career. You've done a lot of different things. And right now at this point, you've done, you've had six decades worth of work. Is the heroic imagination project your only project you're doing right now? or what else are you doing? Or is that your sole focus? Well, the Hero Project is the main thing. I literally go around the world

to these different countries through training. But I'm on my way in a few weeks to Nance France where we have an international time perspective conference where researchers, scientists, business people, artists come together. And we meet every two years. So we're meeting in France. Now in Nance. Last year we met in Copenhagen two years before we met in Warsaw, two years

before that in Coimbra Portugal. So that's really exciting. I'm the grandfather. Most of these of this movement because I developed the scale which people use freely around the world as long as they share the research. So we meet, we talk about the research, we talk about how to reshape our lives to make it more lives, more fulfilling and exciting. So the Hero Project is one dimension, the time perspective is the other dimension. The thing I forgot in your question of what came out of the prison study was shyness. Yeah. Actually, shyness is the thing I would like to be most remembered for. Because in the Stanford, so, because what is shyness? The interesting thing, it's a social handicap. People limit their

freedom of speech, their freedom of association. And the curious thing is nobody says, hey, you're a shy person. Say I'm a shy person and therefore what? I can't do A, B, C, D, E. So in a way, I conceptualize shyness as a self-imposed psychological prison. It's a prison in which you are your own guard and you are your own prisoner. So the guard tells the prisoner, you can't talk to her. You can't ask the boss for a raise even though you deserve it.

Don't raise your hand to answer the question even though you know the answer. going to make a mistake people are going to laugh at you and the prisoner you says okay and the moment you say okay you lower your self-esteem and that's the formula for shyness so i began to study shyness in 1972 the year after the prison study i formed the Stanford shyness project we began to do research on shyness and in 1972 there was zero research on shyness in all of psychology and so we did research and then my students said hey we know a lot Why don't we try to help other shy students? So we formed the Stanford Shinesh Clinic,

and we were incredibly successful because we knew exactly what Shines was. It's either you don't have the social skills, you have negative cognitions, which we can change, or you have physiological arousal. You blush. And so for each person, we found out, how is your shyness manifested,

and then we could focus in, we could change this, this, and this. And we were incredibly successful. 40 years later, our shyness clinic is still operating in Palo Alto University. So for me, that's the model. You get an idea, you do research on it, you get data, and I wrote a book, Shyness, what it is, what to do about it, which is very success. Another book, The Shy Child.

And then you convert that into a therapy that helps people. And so for me, that's the model. an idea, research, share your ideas in therapy, share your ideas in the public domain through, we wrote articles for psychologists, but also for the general public. It's my pleasure speaking with you, Dr. Zimbardo. Thank you for joining us on our podcast. Thank you. Great to be here.

Speaking of psychology is part of the APA Podcast Network, which includes other great podcasts like APA journals dialogue about the latest and most exciting psychological research and progress notes about the practice of psychology. You can find our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit Speakingof Psychology.org to find more episodes and other resources for the topics we discuss. I'm your host, Caitlin Luna, for the American Psychological Association.