Philip Zimbardo
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Philip Zimbardo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · Is It a Theater Piece or a Psychological Experiment? (Update) · 23 Apr 2025
podcast
I remember I was at one of the first performances of Hair.
Seeing hair scrambled his brain because... The performers start walking on the seats over your head and walking down the aisles. And that, I had never experienced that before. And it was really troubling, exhilarating, confusing. Because, again, hair was going to confuse you.
They're going to sing songs about masturbation and black girls having sex with white guys and white guys having sex with... So essentially, before the play began... What they did is set up to say, this is going to shock you. This is going to be off your usual radar. So don't come expecting traditional theater. This is something new. I still remember that. It was like 40 years ago. We starve, look.
In many settings I'm in, I tweak my environment to see what would happen. What would happen if, you know, you go into a restaurant and the waiter gives you a thing and you say, I'd like to start with dessert. And he says, what? I'd like to start with dessert. You've got a really good dessert menu. Sometimes they say, no, you can't. No, you have to start with the appetizer.
I say, no, I'd like the dessert. I'll work backwards. What difference does it make? By putting people in totally new situations, that's really how we discover something about ourselves.
One of the things that strikes me about this interesting play is that it puts the audience in a totally new situation. That is, audiences have never been asked to wear masks, play a role, have a set of rules to govern their behavior.
And as a sidebar, little Stanley Milgram and I were high school classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx... in senior year, 1948, 49. So essentially there was something in that water, but it was really, you know, he was a little Jewish kid who worried about, you know, could the Holocaust happen in America? If Hitler said, electrocute somebody, would you do it? Or Hitler's henchmen?
And everybody said, no, Stanley, we're not that kind of person. And what he said as a high school kid, how do you know unless you're in that situation?
And that was the central commonality in the Milgram-Bedian studies and my Stanford prison study, is we put people in a totally new situation where in both studies we gave people total power over someone else.
And the guards not only were in uniforms, but they had to wear silver-reflecting sunglasses, an idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke. It didn't take long for the situation to curdle.
I began to be the prison superintendent. I see videotapes of my, I'm walking down the yard with my hands behind my back and my chest out. I never do that. I was surprised to see that. But that is how, you know, the military officers, when they're reviewing the troops, that's the many politicians, it's a position of authority and power, which I abhor.
I mean, I always work hard to minimize the power I have as a teacher. And here I was unconsciously assuming it. Now, Zimbardo is a situationist. I'm a situationist, dyed in the wool. Individual variations in, quote, personality predict almost nothing about people in these situations.
The way the study ended was I had invited young faculty members and graduate students who knew nothing about this study to come down and interview all the prisoners, guards, and staff. And Christina Maslach, who had been my graduate student, who we had just started dating, comes down the night before and sees the guards abusing the prisoners.
And I look up, it's a 10 o'clock toilet run, 10 o'clock at night, last time prisoners go to the toilet. And prisoners have bags over their head, legs chained together, yelling, screaming, cursing. And I say, hey, Christina, look at that. Isn't that interesting? And she starts crying and runs out. And we have this big argument. And I'm saying, what kind of psychologist are you?
This is a crucible of human nature. She says, wait a minute. How could you see what I see and not see it as dehumanization? I thought I knew who you were. I don't know who you are. I don't know who this person is. And I'm not sure I want to continue my relationship with you if this is the real you. How long had you been dating by this point? Oh, probably six months.
And when she said it, was it kind of a light bulb moment for you or did you fight against the impulse? No, I fought against the impulse because at some deep level, I knew she was right. I didn't want to believe that I was changed by the situation. I mean, I'm a grown up. I've done lots of research.
Oh, not at all. No, I'm saying it was not a light bulb. It was a lightning bolt. that when she said it, we both talked about it. We subsequently got married the next year because I realized she was my heroine who saved me because the study was going to go another full week. And I'm not sure what would have happened at that point, but it was a lightning bolt.
And of course I resisted at first because what it means is I had made this mistake. I should have ended it days earlier. And essentially it's what administrators do. I didn't do anything wrong, but I allowed wrongdoing to go on. And actually, one of the worst guards said in a later interview, the professor never said I couldn't do it. And therefore, I did it.
My parents were second generation Sicilian. My family background was my grandfather was a barber. My other grandfather was a shoemaker. So it was really, you know, tradespeople.
When I was a child, I was very sickly. In fact, I almost died from pneumonia and whooping cough at a time when there was no penicillin or sulfur drugs for contagious diseases. So I was hospitalized for six months, and kids around me all died, and I survived somehow. Resilience or hardiness, I'm not sure what.
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