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
You know, you could say, do 10 push-ups, do 10 more. But then to tell somebody to sit on your back when you're doing push-ups, that's going beyond the thing. You know, to tell somebody to kiss the other guy as the Bride of Frankenstein, that's being creatively evil.
So again, most of the prisoners said, I'm not sure what I would do, but I would be a guard who played by the rules and not develop new rules.
All that research, in a way, really is trying to answer the question from childhood, what makes good people do bad things? And my focus has always been on trying to understand how situations shape us, mold us, and corrupt us. So starting with an evil orientation, what I try to do is create evil. It's really studying evil from the inside out.
You know, theologians, poets, dramatists, sociologists, you know, criminologists have studied evil. But they've studied evil in place. So what I try to do that's unique is create it. You see the process of transformation. You see people who start off on day one, normal, healthy. You put them in role, and then you see the divergence. The role becomes the person.
And you play a character, and then it becomes your identity.
I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Chip Frederick, because I knew that these were good apples that somebody put in a bad barrel. That's the metaphor I started using. In fact, I know I gave an interview at NPR. And I was the first to say, I want to believe our American soldiers are good. They're not bad apples, as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush and General Myers say.
I believe they were good apples when they got there. And somebody put them in a very bad barrel. And that barrel looks exactly like the prison study. So I got to know really everything there is to know about Albert Grave.
The only abuses happened in that prison on the night shift. None happened on a day shift. And it turns out in Abu Ghraib was part of the unit, was the center of interrogation. So you have military intelligence with its set of interrogators interrogating. Now, they're not getting any information.
For the military, it's called actionable intelligence because what happened was when the insurgency broke out, the military was caught blind. They had no idea this was going to happen. So they start arresting all men and boys around explosion. So they had no information. But now they're interrogating them and they're getting nothing.
So military intelligence goes to the head of military police and says, we need your guys to help us. They got to prepare the prisoners for interrogation, break them, take the gloves off, all these euphemism. And so when we interrogate them, they're going to spill the beans.
And then in three months, no senior officer ever goes down to the dungeon to see what's happening. So this gives them complete liberty to reproduce the Sanford Prison Study in spades, namely to do whatever you want. The guards were not part of the interrogation team. They were simply humiliating, tormenting the prisoners to break their will. So this is the clearest situational variable.
They give guards total power with no oversight, recipe for abuse. And in fact, what they said was, every time an explosion goes off and one of your buddies dies, his blood is on your hands explicitly. So it's not like these guys were getting off on a torture. Essentially, it's you are part of our national security realm.
And if you remember, you know, in the war, it was everybody is for us or against us. So really, if you don't do this, you know, you're suspect.
So the guards got sucked in. But then, as we said earlier, it's now the night shift. So the biggest contributor to evil is boredom. And so you're bored. You've got 12 hours to kill in places filled with stress and danger. And the only playthings are prisoners. And most of the prisoners are already naked. And it's never been the case we have female guards with naked prisoners.
Again, for Muslims, you never show yourself naked in front of a woman. And so the sexual agenda is there. I mean, it's just boiling over. And it only goes down. It gets worse and worse and worse. So the images, the dozen images that were shown on television are almost the least objectionable. The others are even worse.
Hannah Arendt, in trying to understand Eichmann, this brutal killer, coined the term the banality of evil, meaning this guy looks like your Uncle Charlie. I mean, the phrase is he was terrifyingly normal.
And I said, well, isn't that true? If we flip it, isn't there the banality of heroes? That most heroes are ordinary people, everyday people. They do little things each day that we never know about unless they live in a major media city and somebody has to make a videotape. Then I started thinking of heroic things that I knew people did.
And then I said, gee, now we should celebrate heroism more than we do. Well, the problem is with a lot of the stuff on heroes, it really made them seem extra special. These are male warriors, Agamemnon, Achilles, samurai. And there's almost no research on heroism.
We started developing classroom modules, which first started off by saying, be aware of the power of the dark side. So we teach you about the prison study, the messages of a Milgram study. We show videos of a woman lying on a subway station and Liverpool station in London and In five minutes, the little clock is going, 35 people pass right by and nobody stops. The question is, what's wrong?
Are these bad people? And so the kids say, we would help. Well, what's the difference between you sitting here and people there? And they come up with situational differences. And then we teach them these lessons, the Bison Effect, prejudice and discrimination. We get the college kids to teach high school kids. High school kids, they teach middle school kids. It offsets all the evil I've done.
Showing 61–80 of 81 · page 4 of 5
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