Philip Zimbardo Quotes
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My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
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When someone is anonymous, it opens the door to all kinds of antisocial behavior, as seen by the Ku Klux Klan.
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Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
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Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'
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That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training.
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What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?
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Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.
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Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying 'get with the program, be a team player;' this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal.
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There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
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The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.