The Tim Ferriss Show - #226: How to Not Be Evil - Dr. Phil Zimbardo

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Starting point is 00:03:15 at what they do, to tease out the belief systems, philosophies, habits, routines, et cetera, that you can use. This particular episode is different for a few reasons, and I'm very excited about it. Number one, we have our oldest guest to date, 83 years, which I want to do more of. I want to really chronicle and investigate some of these treasures that we have on this planet. And so I may also be going after Don Wildman soon. If you don't know who that is, you will shortly. But this time around, we have someone I've wanted to interview for decades, literally. His name is Dr. Philip Zimbardo, at Phil Zimbardo on Twitter. He is one of the most distinguished psychologists in the world and a professor emeritus at Stanford

Starting point is 00:04:03 University. He is arguably best known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students were turned into mock prisoners and guards for a continuous 24-hour-a-day study. This particular experiment was planned for two weeks but terminated after just six days, and we will dig into why that was the case. He gives a fantastic overview of this study. In this podcast, we also explore how we as humans can do less evil, how you can be a deviant for a day. I highly, highly, highly encourage you all to try this. It's detailed in the conversation. What mindful disobedience is and much more. It was a real blast to finally get him on the phone after having read so much of his work. Apart from all of that, Dr. Zimbardo has served as president of the American Psychological Association and designed and narrated the

Starting point is 00:04:57 award-winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology. He's published more than 50 books, including Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, The Time Cure, The Time Paradox, and most recently, Man Interrupted. The Time Paradox is another one that I recommend to everyone. If you're a fan of the Tony Robbins Dickens Process Exercise as outlined in Tools of Titans, you will love that book. Dr. Zimbardo currently lectures worldwide and is actively working to promote his nonprofit. Trust me, this guy at 83 is more active than almost every person I know. So you will, I believe you will hear phone calls going on in the background. He's traveling all over the world. So don't let it distract you. Back to his current passion and focus, the Heroic Imagination Project, heroicimagination.org.

Starting point is 00:05:42 His current research looks at the psychology of heroism. The question he poses is what pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil while others act heroically on behalf of those in need. And that is precisely among many, many other things what we explore in this conversation. So without further ado, please enjoy a wide ranging conversation with Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo, welcome to the show. Good to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I have wanted to connect with you and speak with you. And I don't say this to many people for many, many decades. In fact, I was a, at least for a period of time, a psychology major, technically in

Starting point is 00:06:27 neuroscience at Princeton, and was actually a subject in some of the experiments of Danny Kahneman. And I was indeed. I tapped a space bar for a very long time in a very dark room. Boring was boring. It was very boring, but hopefully contributed to greater scientific progress in some fashion. I thought we could start with people who are not familiar with your work. When people think of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, what do they tend to associate you most with in the world of psychology or science? Well, my legacy for better or for worse is ye olde Stanford prison experiment, which I did back in 1971. I was recently in Budapest and I'm driving in a taxi and

Starting point is 00:07:22 the taxi driver says, you sound like an American. I said, yes. He said, what do you do? I said, I'm a psychologist. He said, did you ever hear that study where they put college students in a prison? And this is in Budapest, Hungary.

Starting point is 00:07:38 So yeah, so it's what I'm most well known for because it was and is the most dramatic study ever done in psychology, in part because it went 24-7. Most research is just one hour. Typically, it fits into a student's curriculum schedule. But this research went on day and night for a week, and it was supposed to go for two weeks. And so what was special about it is you could actually then see in the videos we took the character transformation of hour by hour, day by day, of good kids beginning to do really bad things. And these were the nine guards and nine prisoners to begin with? Yeah. So if you want me to give a, you want a thumbnail overview? Sure. Let's get a, for those people not familiar, I think it'd be a great place to start. Okay. So the year is 1971. It's the 70s. Exciting things are happening in psychology.

Starting point is 00:08:47 A little bit earlier at Yale, Stanley Milgram, who was my high school classmate at James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1950, he had done the classic research on blind obedience to authority, in which he got mostly men, ages 20 to 50, not college students, to play the role of a teacher who is going to help students improve their memory by punishing errors. And the way they would punish the error is by giving them escalating levels of electric shock to their fingers. And what happened is the confederate, who was pretending to be the student of the teacher, began after a while to yell and scream and say, I have a heart condition, I don't want to go on.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And the question is, would anybody continue? The experimenter kept saying to the real participant, you must go on, you have a contract, you must continue. The experimenter kept saying to the real participant, you must go on, you have a contract, you must continue, teacher. And the amazing thing is two of every three of these adults went all the way to 450 volts, which in a sense could have been lethal. I should back up and say, when Milgram asked 40 psychiatrists at Yale Medical School, what percent of all Americans would go to the bitter end, their estimate was 1%, because to do so, you'd have to be a psychopath. So they're only off by 74%. And so the point is, it's two of every three. I got two out of three. And so, but his research was part of the demonstration of the power of social situations over individual dispositions.

Starting point is 00:10:35 And I followed up, my team at Stanford, Craig Haney and Kurt Banks and David Jaffe and I, followed up by saying, you know, it's rare that somebody will tell you to do something horrible or dangerous. Typically, you're playing a role and in the role and you're in a group and everybody is doing this. So we reconceptualize the setting as a prison and because prisons are all about power and guards have power and prisoners try to get some, and guards try to limit their attempts at power. And so what we did is we put an ad in the Palo Alto newspaper, wanted college students for study of prison life that could go up to two weeks, and 75 people answered the ad. We interviewed each of them, gave them a battery of personality tests. And we picked two dozen who were normal and healthy in every way we could imagine.

Starting point is 00:11:33 And then what happened was we randomly assigned have to be guards, have to be prisoners. And in that setting, they became prisoners or guards. Now, of course, we made it realistic. They had different kind of uniforms. Prisoners had symbols of power, billy clubs, handcuffs, military style uniforms. And the prisoners were in uniforms that simply had a number on it. We took away the name, they became dehumanized. And the amazing thing was in 36 hours, a normal, healthy college student, and these are not students from Stanford. They were from all over the United States who were in the Bay Area finishing off summer

Starting point is 00:12:12 school. One of the prisoners, 8612, I still remember vividly, had an emotional breakdown, screaming, crying, out of control. And each day thereafter, another prisoner had a similar reaction. So we ended the study after five days because it was out of control. And we could not imagine that a social situation could have such a profound impact. But what happened was the guards really became creatively sadistic. There were three guards working eight-hour shifts, and there were three shifts, and there were nine prisoners at any one time, three in a cell.

Starting point is 00:12:52 And then the remaining, there were backup guards and backup prisoners. And so the study ended on this very down note of good kids doing really bad things to each other, creatively evil in the role of guard. And this has some very wide-reaching implications, it would seem, and you've written extensively about this, and it has relevance to many things that are happening in our modern day today, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, I suppose you could call it. And it was blamed on rogue soldiers, but you were one to point out that it was a bigger issue than that. You couldn't necessarily isolate a few bad actors. It was more of a systemic issue. Yeah, you hit it right on the head is that for your listeners, we'll just go back in time. In 2004, someone released pictures of American prison guards in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, humiliating, torturing, degrading, sexually abusing prisoners who they should have been protecting. So these were images that came

Starting point is 00:14:05 from the cameras of the guards themselves. And it was a global disgrace to America at a time when the war in Iraq was still a big problem, big issue. And what happened was, again, obviously the military disowned it to say there were a few bad apples. And curiously, I was in Washington, DC, when that broke, I had been the president at Stanford, where I taught for 50 years, called me and said, hey, Dr. Z, those images that we just showed were the same as the images you showed us in class of the prison experiment. Wow. Putting bags over a prisoner's head, stripping them naked, et cetera. And so would you like to come on to be interviewed? And I was, and I simply said, look, my hypothesis is that most American soldiers are good apples. And what we have to realize is someone put them in a bad barrel. And we have to know who are the bad barrel makers, because that's who should be on trial, not the soldiers at the end of the line.

Starting point is 00:15:24 And that became an interesting metaphor, bad apples, that's what's wrong with the individual versus bad barrels, which is the situational analysis. And then, of course, the system is the bad barrel makers, the people who make those situations and sustain them. And then I actually defended Chip Frederick, who is the staff sergeant who should have been in charge of the night shift, but he too got sucked into the frivolity. They simply say we're having fun and games, and they did not have any idea that the images that they took with their cameras would be released to the world. And a few follow-up questions related to that. And I suppose the big question in my mind is,

Starting point is 00:16:09 if you are someone who views themselves as a good person, or at worst, a neutral person who doesn't want to do evil, how do you avoid the circumstances or the slippery slope of evil? Are there things that you can keep in mind or reminders that you can set for yourself, things you can avoid to help to mitigate that risk? No, that's a great, great way to frame it is that evil is seductive. In fact, Christians around the world say to their God, lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. And the point is, evil comes in many sizes, many shapes. There is the evil of action, doing bad things, but there's also the evil of inaction, not doing the right thing when you could. So this is what comes up in the bystander effect made famous, I guess, 60 years

Starting point is 00:17:13 ago in New York City when a young woman was being assaulted, Kitty Genovese, and screamed and screamed and people heard and no one came to her aid. So the bystander metaphor is that people around the world do not come to the aid of someone in an emergency who needs their help. And so these are fundamental themes is that it's so easy to cross the line. And in all the research done in psychology, the Milgram study, the Samson study, and many, many other experiments, the curious thing is, even though the majority gives in, complies, conforms, there's always a minority, 10%, 20%, sometimes 30% who resist. And so I began to study what is it about those people who resist the temptation, the power of the group, especially when everybody else in the group is

Starting point is 00:18:14 doing it, say, come on, it's fun and games. And so I began to think of them as everyday heroes. I wrote a book called The Lucifer Effect, and the subtitle is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. And the book has 10 chapters on the prison study, two chapters on our grave, and then a lot of chapters on evil around the world, Bosnia, Rwanda. And then in the end, I'm buried in evil. I mean, it took two years to write the book,

Starting point is 00:18:42 and I'm swimming in a sea of evil. And it was so depressing every morning to sit at my desk and say, oh my God, which evil am I going to deal with today? So in chapter 16, if anybody in the audience has not read the book, start with 16 and work backwards. So 16 is really celebrating the banality of heroism in the same way that Hannah Arendt in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem talked about Eichmann as illustrating the banality of evil. That is, here's a monster who orchestrated the deaths of millions of Jews who looks like your Uncle Charlie, who acts like an intelligent Uncle Charlie, because he was a very formal, intelligent guy. And so I use that metaphor to say, you know, when we think about heroes, we really think about classical heroes.

Starting point is 00:19:38 We think about Agamemnon and Achilles. We think about modern heroes like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, but those people are lifelong heroes. What we should really be thinking is about ordinary people like any of us, ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary deeds of goodness, of kindness, of compassion, and we should think of them as heroes in training. That is, each day doing daily deeds of goodness and kindness that are not heroic in and of themselves, but they're really on a path toward heroism. And what we think is those people, when a big opportunity arises, when there is an earthquake, when there is a terrorist attack, they will be the ones more likely to take a wise and effective action. And I embodied all of that in a new program I started in San Francisco back in 2008 called the Heroic Imagination Project or HIP. And the idea is heroism really starts in the mind.

Starting point is 00:20:42 You have to think of yourself as I could be a hero rather than heroism really starts in the mind. You have to think of yourself as, I could be a hero, rather than heroism is something that's a job of other people, or is the job of comic book characters. And I'd love to dig into a few of the things that you just discussed. So the first is, and I love the latter portion of talking about the everyday hero and these components, in part because I believe very much that if we're looking for, I would say, patterns of behavior, I tend to agree with one of my favorite quotes, which is Archilochus, who's a Greek poet, and it is, we do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training. So if you're focusing on these daily behaviors on a micro level, then the hope is that on a macro level, like you said, when there's an earthquake and a disaster response or something like that, if you need to triage, you'll be the one to take that step forward. I've looked at,

Starting point is 00:21:39 for instance, the Lucifer effect and some of the writing around it. And I found seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil. And I'd love to just read these off and then ask a follow-up question. So the first is mindlessly taking the first small step. The second, dehumanization of others. Third, de-individuation of self, in other words, anonymity, then diffusion of personal responsibility, blind obedience to authority, uncritical conformity to group norms, and then last, which you mentioned, the kind of error of the evil of omission and not commission, that is passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference. Is it possible to become more heroic by doing the very opposite? So in other words,

Starting point is 00:22:28 making these imperatives the opposite. Yeah. So all of these I would embed in the broader context of the importance of situational sensitivity, situational awareness. So Milgram and I highlighted the power of social situations to dominate personality, but it doesn't mean it's ubiquitous, but it doesn't mean it's inevitable. Step one is to realize your vulnerability, all of our vulnerability. Situational forces come in many different forms, many different shapes, but it's always to be mindful of what is happening around you. And just to be aware that situational forces, a group pressure, what other people are doing,

Starting point is 00:23:16 how you're dressed, what the situation is, can influence your behavior. And so some of the things that you had just mentioned are really part of a greater sensitivity to things happening around you in the social situation rather than in the physical environment. And if we want to go through one by one, I can just elaborate just a little bit on each. Absolutely. Yes, please. So number one was? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Yeah. So the conclusion from the Milgram experiment should be all evil begins with 15 volts. So in the Milgram study, the participants had in front of them a big shock box that had 30 switches that began with 15 volts and increased by 15 volt increments, 15, 30, 45. And of course, there was a label above the mild shock, strong, moderate shock, etc.

Starting point is 00:24:14 But the key is, you know, imagine you're sitting in front of the shock box and you see at the end, it says danger high voltage, 350 volts, you know, 75, 450. You have to say to yourself, you know, when I press this first button, what's going to keep me from continuing to press the next one, and the next one, and the next one? And then would I ever want to go to 450 volts? So obviously, I wouldn't. But the but the point is once you press 15 volts, you are on that slippery slope of evil because it becomes easier and easier. And when you press 15 volts, you know what? Nothing happens. The guy doesn't even notice it. But 15 volts then is really like the first time you cheat a little bit on a test in school, the first time somebody

Starting point is 00:25:06 tells you a sexist or racist joke, and you either smile or giggle or laugh a little bit, rather than say, I think that's inappropriate. So again, to be aware that even though there's nothing truly negative in that first 15 volts, it is literally on the path of what we consider a slippery slope of evil. It's going to be 35. I mean, it's going to be 75. It's going to be 100. And then in two out of three cases, it gets to be 450 volts. Right. So being very aware of the seemingly harmless gateway drugs down the slippery slope. Right. The number two is dehumanization of others.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Yeah. The center of all prejudice, of all discrimination, is thinking about other people as less than human. So in our prison experiment, we took away people's names, which is part of your humanity. We replaced them with numbers. They were 86124163609. And after a very short time, for example, when a Catholic priest who had been a prison chaplain came to see the prisoners at my request, he asked them,

Starting point is 00:26:21 what's your name, son? Almost all of them gave their number. In a very short time, they had accepted our dehumanization and became that number. Now, that dehumanization takes other forms. So by talking about migrants, rather than people who are migrating out of danger, talking about in San Francisco, we have a big problem with the homeless. They're not homeless. They are people who do not have a home. So again, it's focusing on these are people in different circumstances of tragedy. But once you apply a label, it's just like saying, and these are, you know, for Italians, WAPs were dirty Jew or something of that kind. Once you put a label on other people, you take away their humanity, and then you treat them as less than human. Yeah, I mean, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:27:23 And I mean, this can proactively be done, of course, with those who orchestrate propaganda. I mean, meaning warfare, wartime propaganda, whether it's a Goebbels, or if you look at some of the collateral that was created during World War II in the Pacific theater, I mean, it's on both sides. The objective is to dehumanize so your soldiers are more effective in some cases. Yeah. Sam Kean, who's, I guess I would call him a social philosopher, lives nearby here in Marin.

Starting point is 00:27:56 He has a wonderful book called Faces of the Enemy. And what he shows with graphic visuals, that before any nation goes to war, they prepare their people to hate the other, the enemy, by having these visual depictions of them as less than human. And then in the end, mothers are willing to send their sons to war, potentially die, to protect them from the, in quote, the enemy. So it's really a critical aspect. Now, I'm jumping ahead. One of the ways that I work to prevent that is I am distressed, especially now in San Francisco where we have cold and rain. We have hundreds, I don't know, 7,000 homeless people on the street, many old ladies, sometimes families.

Starting point is 00:28:52 So each day I decide, am I going to give them 50 cents, a dollar? But I don't just give money to a homeless person. What I do is I try to humanize them. I will pick someone on the street and then simply say, hello, I'm Shulz and Barta, what's your name? And they're often surprised. I shake their hand. I give them a doll.

Starting point is 00:29:12 I say, I wish it could be more. I hope your luck improves. And I take one minute to make, to convert that dehumanizing experience into a human one. And I had an occasion recently where a woman began to cry, I mean, because no one had done that simple thing. Okay, number three.

Starting point is 00:29:34 De-individuation. Yeah, so I did early research when I was at New York University before I came to Stanford. Simply putting people in masks, putting people in hoods, taking away their visual sense, putting them in the dark. It's a Mardi Gras effect. We are able to show that when your identity is removed and you're in a situation that gives you permission to be harmful, aggressive, you will take it. So we did an experiment at New York University where we had

Starting point is 00:30:05 college female, college psych one females, who half of them we put in hoods and we took away the name. They became one, two, three, four, and half of them we made feel special. And then they had the opportunity to give electric shock, they thought, to other women who were trying to remember material under stress. And what we found is college women gave twice as much electric shock to other women when they were de-individuated than when they were not. And so when you're anonymous, it takes away, again, this links to another point, your sense of personal responsibility. No one knows and no one cares. Now, again, it goes both ways. In the Mardi Gras, if you're in a situation of fun and, and essentially you then go with the flow, for better or for worse.

Starting point is 00:31:13 Right, it removes the social inhibitions regardless of the particular type or species of impulse, whether it's towards lust or aggression or otherwise. The next you already alluded to, in a sense, is diffusion of personal responsibility. Yeah. So this ties into what we're talking about bystander effect is that ordinarily, we each feel responsible for our actions. We feel responsible for people around us, certainly our friends and family, neighbors. And again, my hero project tries to extend that to say, you know, the world is my neighbors. The world is, it could be my friends. And all the research on diffusion responsibility simply says that when you see other people like you passing by someone in need, then they create a social norm of doing nothing when you know you should be doing something. And something sometimes is very, very simple, helping somebody up who's fallen down. is that not allowing the social norm of other people being bad Samaritans to change your sense to be a good Samaritan.

Starting point is 00:32:32 Now, one of the things, there's a fascinating study that you probably know about. It was done by John Darley and his student, Daniel Batson. And it was at Princeton, Princeton Theological Seminary, where what they did was they got a bunch of Princeton Theological students, kids who are going to become ministers. And they said, we're studying the power of sermons. And we'd like you to give the sermon on the Good Samaritan. Do you know that? Of course they know that.

Starting point is 00:33:02 And we want you to go to, from the psych lab, go to the recording studio, which is down this alleyway. And when you get there, they'll be waiting for you. And we just have to record your best sermon about the Good Samaritan. So here are good guys, Princeton Theological students, maybe good girls too, who thinking about being a good Samaritan and on the way they encounter a woman in a hallway moaning, clearly in need. Now, do they help? It turns out they help if they are told, you know, you have enough time. If they told you are late, please hurry.

Starting point is 00:33:48 Then 80% pass her by. 80% of the people, Princeton theologians, on the way to give the Good Samaritan, turn out to be bad Samaritans if they're in a hurry. So for me, that's such an important message these days where everybody is in a hurry. We all feel time pressed. Even worse, we don't even notice somebody's moaning in a corner because we're walking, looking at our iPads, our iPhones, our iPad, and holding a Starbucks in the other hand. No, absolutely. And this has a bunch of different paths we could travel in this conversation. I do want to talk more about time a little bit later, but just to return to the diffusion of personal responsibility, this also has tremendous implications for, say, and this relates to the bystander effect, but disaster response. And as one example, I did

Starting point is 00:34:38 training here in Northern California for NERT, which I believe stands for Northern California Emergency Response Training or Team. And San Francisco lacks the municipal resources to respond to, say, a catastrophic, very high-level earthquake, for instance. They don't have the fire engines and medical resources to contend with a catastrophe of that scale. So they train volunteers, the fire department and police department train volunteers to help in such a case. And one of the things that they teach is in a group emergency triage situation, if you decide to take control of that situation and try to lead that you never, that you always identify individuals in the group and assign them specific tasks.

Starting point is 00:35:28 You, and you get their attention, do this. You do that because if it's a generic command to the group, nothing's going to happen. Yeah. I see it now again for your listeners. If we turn it around, if you are ever the victim, if you are ever hurt, and there are people around you, the way you get help is you simply say, you, you point to someone, you with the green dress, you with the brown blazer, you redhead. So you single them out and you break down that anonymity of the group and you're much more likely to get help. So what they're telling you in terms of being an emergency respondent, I'm saying if you are the victim, the same principle holds. Absolutely. The next is blind obedience to authority. Well, you see, again, we are all trained as children to obey our parents, our teachers, our religious leaders, in some cases, our politicians. But nobody teaches us the distinction between authorities that deserve our respect and authorities that do not. Not all parents, not all ministers. We certainly know from the

Starting point is 00:36:46 horrific consequences of sexual abuse by thousands of Catholic priests over dozens of years that a lot of such people don't deserve respect. But nowhere do we get training in differentiating appropriate from inappropriate authorities., authorities that deserve respect versus authorities that deserve defiance. And so, again, I think in most societies, we err in the direction of, well, you know, just obey authority. And the Milgram study shows how easy it is for that to get overextended. So the authority in the Milgram study was a guy in a white lab coat. He was actually a high school biology teacher. He knew nothing about psychology.

Starting point is 00:37:35 He was just recruited by Milgram. And here he had a Milgram study. They tested a thousand people. So here he had hundreds and hundreds of adults in New Haven, Connecticut, blindly following his orders to shock more and more. And he was not an expert. He just had the trappings, the white lab coat of science. So again, it's be wary of authorities wearing false lab coats. Is there any particular recommendation that you would have for someone who wants to train themselves to more consciously question or assess authority?

Starting point is 00:38:21 Is there any type of mental practice that you have for yourself or question that you ask yourself on a regular basis to help with that? I think this is a very divisive problem that we have in the United States and certainly not limited to the United States right now in many respects. But if somebody wanted to train themselves to be better at avoiding blind obedience to authority, is there any particular recommendation you would have? Yeah, I think it's, again, questioning. I mean, legitimately questioning to say, why should I do that? What are the positive consequences if I do it?

Starting point is 00:38:58 What are the negative consequences if I don't? Rather than assuming, if somebody says, do do that because they're an authority, that without directly questioning their authority or power, I think the burden has to be on them to be willing to explain to you why you should do what they say. And they have to give you a good enough reason. And it can't be because I said so. I mean, again, many parents say, you have to do it because I said so. Well, at some point, you have to say, that's not a reason. You know, that's an opinion. That's an authority. And then ultimately, you have to be willing to challenge it. And when you challenge authority, there will be some

Starting point is 00:39:42 penalties. You know, if you're a kid, you get slapped in the face by your parents. But I think you have to practice mindful disobedience. Mindful disobedience. I like that. The next is uncritical conformity to group norms. Yeah. For all of us, especially as teenagers, when we're forming our identities, when nothing in the world is more important than to be popular, to have kids like us, that we are willing to become them. That we dress like them, the music we like is their music, our hair, whether we have tattoos, whether we have piercings, all depends, all depends on, you know, who our peer group, who our in-group is. And the problem is they begin to have enormous power over us. So if your

Starting point is 00:40:33 peer group begins to smoke, then chances are you're going to be smoking. And if you start smoking, you're going to die young. If they are taking drugs, you not only take drugs, you take their kind of drug. If they are discriminating against, if a guy is discriminating against girls, you do the same. If they're discriminating against outsiders, people different than you. So groups have enormous power to shape our behavior, our way of thinking, our attitudes. As an individual, you have to separate out what parts of that group am I willing to go along with because I want to be accepted. I don't want to be rejected. And what parts are unacceptable?

Starting point is 00:41:17 That is, I should be willing to be rejected rather than to do some of the things that they would like me to do. One way to be aware of the influence people have on you is to be a deviant for a day. And the simplest thing to do is you put, with a magic marker that is erasable, a square on your forehead. Okay? And once you put it on, you know, you look in the mirror, you see where it is, and then you don't see it anymore. And people are going to say, what is that? It's nothing.

Starting point is 00:41:49 It's a square. I'm just trying something out. You begin to see very quickly how people put pressure on you to take it off. You're not different. You're not different in any way. There's a little mark on your forehead. And so what we find is very difficult to resist the temptation to just wipe it off, because then you're doing what they want you to do. And the idea is if you can resist one day, eight hours, then suddenly you realize you have this inner power to be your own person.

Starting point is 00:42:19 And especially with parents, I mean, mothers get crazed. You know, your best friend even said, come on, take it off. You're embarrassing them, you know, by extension. So I invite your listeners to try the game of being a deviant for a day. Simply put a square with a magic, erasable magic mark on your forehead, a small square, and keep it on for a day. And just notice first the pressure people put on you to be what they want you to be. Take it off. And you'll feel the temptation to do what they want

Starting point is 00:42:51 you to do. But the learning message is that be sensitive to the pressure people put on you to be what they want you to be in other ways, to like their kind of music, to dress the way they do, to share in their political views, et cetera. I used to have my students at Stanford do things like that, but also dress up if you usually dress down, dress down if you usually dress up, or just do some weird stuff and watch how people get really upset at you for very small deviations from what they think is ordinary and normal. So I love this type of exercise and I want to double down and encourage, just like you did, listeners to try this deviant for a day with the square. The erasable is important, folks. Don't do this with a Sharpie on your

Starting point is 00:43:45 forehead and take a photo, put it on social. Tell us what happened because- I appreciate that. Yeah. Absolutely. Because these types of, I've called them comfort challenges in the past, I think are so critical. I've had, for instance, some of my readers before go to a Starbucks and just lay down on the floor for five seconds and then get back up. And people behave, doing something like that helps you to inoculate yourself against harmful conformity. And it also makes me think a lot of Cato, for instance, considered the best or the perfect Stoic by Seneca and others who would deliberately wear, say, tunics of unfashionable colors to subject himself to ridicule so that he would learn to be ashamed of only those things worth being ashamed of.

Starting point is 00:44:38 So I love this idea. I absolutely love it. The last one is passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference. Yeah. So that ties into the, the future responsibility. Again, there's evil of action, doing bad things, bullying, sharing prejudice points of view. But there's also not doing it yourself, but accepting it by others. I always think of the case of my Uncle Charlie, who at family gatherings would tell the same jokes. It was either sexist jokes or racist jokes. And after a while, people would be horrified, but no one would say to Uncle Charlie,

Starting point is 00:45:22 I wish you wouldn't do it. And so one of the issues is how do you have courageous conversations with people like Uncle Charlie who is probably unaware of the negative impact he's having? Partly he's been telling these jokes for years and years when it was more socially acceptable. And how do you have a courageous conversation, for example, to say, gee, Uncle Charlie, I love the way you try to make us all feel happy and relax and tell jokes. But maybe you should tell a different kind of joke because some people wouldn't understand what you mean about black people or, or women, uh, with whether or not they have big breasts, no. Uh, and, and I think we're going to like it even more. So, so the key is you want to change behavior and the, without the person becoming defensive and really saying, you know, yeah, screw you. I do whatever I want. No, it's, um, it reminds me of a few things. There's a quote that I really like from Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She has a quote, which is, tolerance of intolerance is cowardice. And I think that that is certainly one way it might seem to be not directly related, but it does tie in nicely. There's a book called Lying. It's a very short book by Sam Harris, who's a neuroscience PhD.

Starting point is 00:46:53 Yeah, I know him. Yes. And it's a fantastically powerful and concise book about the damage done by white lies or not speaking truth. And it is a really powerful, dense tome in the best possible way. I'd love to, if we have some time to explore it, I'd love to talk about the time paradox. Oh, sure. Time came up in a few cases earlier, and the importance and impact of perception of time in the case of the would-be good Samaritans who, when rushed, 80% running by the person in need. And I think you've written this, that every significant choice, every important decision we make is determined by our perception of time. This is something I'd like to explore. Could you please describe for influence on all your decisions, whether big ones or small ones, and decisions that leads you to your actions is something inside of you that you're unaware of. And what it is, it's your sense of time perspective. And time perspective is the way you categorize and

Starting point is 00:48:34 partition your sense of time into categories. The big ones are past, present, and future. And what we've discovered is it's much more complex and subtle, so that all of us live in multiple time zones. For some of us, if I ask you, tell me about your past. Tell me your recollections of your childhood. Tell me your recollections of what happened last year. For some people, their answers are always focused around all the good things, good times, good awards, successes, birthday parties. For others, it's all the negatives, failures, regrets, things you could have done or should have done, abuse of various ways. And we now can categorize those as people who live in the past positive or past negative.

Starting point is 00:49:27 And then when I ask you about your present, for some people, people we call present hedonists will outline all the fun things they do, all the pleasures they get out of life, seeking knowledge, seeking sensation, seeking novelty. Other people are present fatalists. They say it doesn't pay to plan for the future. I don't control anything. My life is controlled by fate. And this is true if you're a Muslim, Allah controls your future. Now, there are two ways to be future. So one future orientation is probably most of your listeners focus on what do I have to do now to achieve objectives and goals that will

Starting point is 00:50:07 take place in the future. So these are positive future, future of hope, future of possibilities. There's two other ways to be future oriented. One is future negative, that you're anxious, will I be able to succeed? Will I be able to achieve? And so the future, instead of being filled with hope, is filled with anxiety. A third way to be future-oriented is we call transcendental future, that I live my life so that when I die, I will go to heaven rather than hell. And so it's a different kind of system. I'm not seeking success. I'm seeking behaving in a way to be seen as a good person on judgment day. And I've developed a scale, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, Z-T-P-I, which when you take it, it gives you scores on each of these dimensions. And if you go to my website, it's thetimeparadox.com.

Starting point is 00:51:08 You can take the scale and you get immediate feedback on your scores. Now, what's critical is we've discovered with lots and lots of research is that the most important thing in life is to have what we call a balanced time perspective, BTP, which means being high on past positive, being moderately high on future so that you're not a workaholic, a positive future, and being moderate on present hedonism, which is selected when you do as a reward for doing, achieving good deeds with your future orientation. So there's lots of research that show people have high, a balanced time perspective, are physically healthier, psychologically healthier, achieve more, that always, and this is research from around the world, these are the most successful people psychologically and even within the business

Starting point is 00:52:14 world. So this research that I started back in 19, I guess about 2000, we now have an international time perspective group, hundreds and hundreds of young researchers in many countries around the world. We meet biannually in Portugal, in Warsaw, in Copenhagen. Next year, we'll meet in Marseille, meet and talk about research we're doing. And it's not just research, it's application. So these ideas are in psychotherapy, in family therapy, and clearly in business. So it's something I'm really proud of, that just a little research idea, and as I said, partly came out of the Sanford Prison Experiment,

Starting point is 00:53:00 where everybody's sense of time was distorted because the evil of the guards made every hour feel like many, many, many more hours. the time paradox have made in their own lives or that attendees for instance at the time perspective conference have made in their own lives as a result of this work does anything come to mind oh for sure I mean wait you know for the people who live in the past negative in the extreme this is post-traumatic stress disorder you know, one third of all American vets coming back from Iraq, from Afghanistan, are suffering with PTSD, which in traditional treatment is incurable. We drug them to keep it from getting worse.

Starting point is 00:54:00 We've developed a time perspective therapy with my colleagues in Maui, Rick and Rosemary Sword, in which we are able in eight sessions to, quote, cure, in our sample, it was like 32 vets with extreme case of PTSD. And part of it is teaching them about the psychology of time perspective and converting each of those negatives into a positive. Yes, of course, you know, it's not undermining the negative. Yes, your best buddy died in your arms. Yes, you saw children being sexually abused. But now what we're going to do is we're going to put in positive slides in your slide tray, using an old metaphor. You know, did your family write to you while you're there? Did you make any friends?

Starting point is 00:54:53 Did you do any good deeds? So now, clearly what's happened, people have this negative time perspective. They have just loaded up, they've just exaggerated, misfocused on a few negatives, as if that's all there was. Even people have had abuse in life that literally had some real abuse. You say, you know, we want you, we're going to help you elaborate on all the good things in your life. Yes, so one teacher embarrassed you. Tell us about all the teachers who praised you. Tell us about all the teachers who made you feel special. So again, it's literally possible, if you understand the psychology of time perspectives, change your own time perspective, your time perspective of others. So again, in the time paradox, and our other book is called

Starting point is 00:55:42 The Time Cure, we give very specific suggestions. If you want to be more future-oriented, here's what you can do. If you want to be, again, the problem with being too future-oriented is you become a workaholic. So how do you put some present hedonism joy into your life? And so again, I try to go from being a general researcher trying to discover how the mind and behavior work to always saying, how can we use these ideas to make our life better, richer, more productive? And simply to take joy in being a human being. I mentioned before we started recording, but the fact that I received an early galley copy of The Time Paradox, it must have been in- It must have been a child, right? It must have been. No, no, it must have been 2008 or very late 2007, I think 2008. And I found it very impactful and underlined a lot in that book.

Starting point is 00:56:49 And I ended up, among other things, each morning, and this is a recent implementation, but I have a five-minute journal routine where I try to present state ground myself with a few things like gratitude bullets and so on before going on to the goal setting so that I'm not anxious and constantly future focused. But one of the affirmations, so to speak, that I found most helpful is I am unrushed. And this comes back directly to the story about the good Samaritans from the theological seminary. And it's proven to be incredibly therapeutic for me. I would encourage people to check out The Time Paradox. I found it to be a brilliant exploration.

Starting point is 00:57:35 And it also, a lot of what you've written about corresponds to one of the most powerful exercises that I've experienced and studied of Tony Robbins. He has a process that he calls the Dickens process. And the Dickens process refers to the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. And taking people through these different tenses in a number of respects to, like you said, replace or at least augment some of the slides in their current slideshow. Yeah, but that's a great, I mean, again, we all tell the story of Dickens and Scrooge and living in the past, present and future. The point is, we have to combine those. When we think about the past, present, and future. The point is we have to combine those. When we think about the past, how do we embellish it, enrich it?

Starting point is 00:58:31 But we want to enjoy, we want to live in the moment. We want to enjoy the present of family, friends, fun. We now know the importance of spending time outside in the natural environment, not living at our desks or in our cell phone environment. And again, we want to have hope, possibility is in the future. How do we shape our past and present to make us ready to enjoy the best in the future? And also to think the future is always shapeable, modifiable by our actions.

Starting point is 00:59:08 Now the other thing I should add here is that one of the ideas I promote in the Heroic Imagination Project is we are most effective in teams, in small groups. I call them hero squads. So when you want to challenge authority, when you do it alone, authority dismisses you as a fanatic. When you have three or more people who agree with you and you confront authority, then it is a point of view. When you say, we believe, sir, that what you're doing is not appropriate, is not in our best interest, they can't dismiss you individually. So again, when you're challenging unjust authority in the classroom, in an organization, in a church, whatever it is, it is always better to do it as part of a small operating team. Is the defining difference between heroism and altruism the resistance of some type of authority figure or authority? Is that one of the

Starting point is 01:00:19 differentiators? No, no. The key between altruism is doing social good. Heroism is doing civic virtue. The difference is altruism is heroism light. The key is to be a hero. It's to take action on behalf of others in need or defending a moral cause. And the key now is aware of potential risks and costs to you. So I give blood to blood bank. I give money to homeless people who are homeless. I work in a soup kitchen. It doesn't cost me anything except a little bit of time. So in the extreme of heroism, you die. You risk your life, life and limb. Whistleblowers often lose their job and don't get promoted. But the key is just a perception, I'm doing this despite the fact that there could be a cost, that there's some potential risk to me. And even though I'm aware of that, nevertheless, I continue to do it. If you have five more minutes. Oh, I have all the time in the world.

Starting point is 01:01:27 I just want to be respectful of your time. I definitely have time. No. So I will tie in this last thing with the prison experiment and the reason why I ended the study. And it also ties to heroism. So the Stanford Prison Study was scheduled to go for two weeks. I doubt if I could have really gone more than a week. I probably would have gone, it started on Sunday. I probably would have gone to the following Sunday to make it a full week, partly because

Starting point is 01:01:57 it was overwhelmingly stressful. It wasn't clear to me what it meant to have an experiment that runs night and day continuously. It was me, two graduate students, one undergraduate, and then one graduate student had to leave in the middle of the study, had a family emergency. So we have me and two students working 24-7. Prisoners are having a breakdown every single day. Parents are coming for visiting day. There's parole board hearings for prisoners who want to leave. There's visiting prison chaplains. There's rumor of escape plan. There's all these things happening. And of course, I'm in charge and I'm sleeping on a couch in my office on the second floor of the psychology apartment, Jordan Hall. And so I'm overwhelmed with stress, but I'm going to keep it, probably keep it going

Starting point is 01:02:45 till the weekend. And then on Thursday night, my girlfriend, Christina Maslach, who had been a graduate student at Stanford, who had just got a job at Berkeley to start in September, said she was working at the Stanford library. And, you, and could we have dinner in the evening? So I had to come down on Thursday night. So the study started August 14th, 1971. So this is like five days in. And I said, come down and then we'll go out to dinner. And what she sees is what is listed on my schedule as the 10 o'clock toilet run. At 10 o'clock was the last time prisoners could go to a real toilet. After that, they had to urinate and defecate in a bucket in their cell,

Starting point is 01:03:34 which they hated to do because it smelled terrible. So the guards used the guards on the night shift, and the night shift was the worst one, just as in Abu Ghraib. The night shift was where all the disaster took place, partly because they thought nobody was looking. That the guards lined the prisoners up, put paper bags over their head, chained their legs together, started yelling and cursing and abusing them in every way. This is at Stanford. This is in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Starting point is 01:04:00 Right. And the same thing in Abu Ghraib, but in the same way for his experiment. So I look up, I'm looking through a one-way screen. And for me, it's a check mark on my daily schedule, you know, eight o'clock breakfast, 10 o'clock visiting day, 12 o'clock lunch, two o'clock parole board hearing. It's a 10 o'clock toilet run. And I look at my Christina, I say, hey, look at that. Isn't it interesting? She begins to tear up and runs out, runs out to the quad in front of Jordan Hulse. And I run out. We have this big argument.

Starting point is 01:04:33 I'm saying, you don't understand the dynamics of human nature. Nobody's seen this before in action, et cetera. And she says, stop. These are not prisoners. These are not guards. They're boys and they are suffering and you are responsible and then she says you have been changed by the power of the situation more than anyone and how could you not see the suffering that is obvious and I'm still arguing and then

Starting point is 01:04:59 she says stop if this is the real you I don't think I want to continue my romantic relationship with you. We had just moved in together. We were thinking of living together and getting married. And so to tie back to the point I made, so this is heroism in action. She's saying, I'm willing to pay the cost of giving up a lifetime with you, and we were very much in love, if you don't come to your senses. Now, she never said you have to end the study. She just said, you have to realize that your perception is being distorted by the role you're playing as prison superintendent. And at that moment, I said, oh my God, you're right. We had dinner at like midnight, and then I ended the study the next day. So this is the best example

Starting point is 01:05:51 I know of heroism in action, an ordinary person, you know, a former student confronting authority, and just making it clear that, you know, that she is willing to pay this price in order to challenge this moral injustice that was happening. That is a great story. And I think it's a great place to wrap up for today, this installment. We're practically neighbors, so it'd be to to meet in person at some point but i i really appreciate you taking the time dr zimbardo this has been uh a dream conversation of mine for a very long time so i really appreciate you carving out the time in your schedule you seem to be as as as occupied and engaged as ever with the world. More so, yeah. I should mention that I teach at Stampin' maybe once a year. I give a model lecture to introductory psych. I taught more students in more different courses than any professor in Stampin' history.

Starting point is 01:06:57 I had classes of over 1,000 students in introductory psych. But now I go around the world and I do training in our Heroic Imagination Project in Hungary, in Poland, in Sicily, soon in Czech Republic, in Bali, in Australia. So I keep busy. You certainly do. And you taught, well, you taught for, I guess, 57 years. Is that right? Retired after, officially retired after teaching for certainly 50 plus years, but you're still teaching. That's the beauty of it. You've just chosen a different, a different, uh, vehicle through which to teach. And, uh, first and foremost, thank you for, for jumping on the phone and to everybody listening,

Starting point is 01:07:40 uh, you can find the show notes links to all of these books, articles, studies, and so on as usual in the show notes where you can find links to every other episode as well at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness

Starting point is 01:08:46 before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #226: How to Not Be Evil - Dr. Phil Zimbardo

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #226: How to Not Be Evil - Dr. Phil Zimbardo

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