EMPEROR OF THE EDGE

Interviews Phil Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University. History of his interest in psychology; His relations with Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist; Some of his negative experiences.

By Christina Maslach, published on September 01, 2000

Prison experiment pioneer and father of shyness research Philip Zimbardo,Ph.D., discusses prejudice and popularity, the genius of "Candid Camera," why smart people do dumb things, and the little-known but most important influence on all of human behavior

I'm interviewing Phil Zimbardo for PSYCHOLOGOY TODAY--not only because I am a professor of psychology myself, but because I've been married to the man for 28 years, and can therefore ask some more personal questions.

For many people, Dr. Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, is an intense, energetic and highly visible presence in the field of psychology. He's a researcher of such intriguing and controversial issues as the psychology of evil, madness in normal people, shyness in adults, and the impact of prisons and cults. He's an award-winning teacher whose classes attract audiences in the hundreds. If you take an introductory psychology course, you may well study from the textbook he authored, Psychology And Life, which is now in its 16th edition. And if you watched the TV series "Discovering Psychology," which he wrote and hosted, you may also know him as Uncle Phil, as do many high school students.

Phil, where did your focus on psychology come from?

PHILIP ZIMBARDO: I think 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.

When I was five and a half, I got double pneumonia and whooping cough--in 1939, before penicillin was discovered--so I was put in the Willard Park Hospital for Children With Contagious Diseases. It was a huge ward with a sea of beds. Some kids lived, and some kids died. It was a cruel game of genetic roulette. There was no medication, no therapy, no treatment. We never got out of bed. We were never allowed to touch another kid or touch or kiss visiting parents.

But what I got out of that six-month experience--which was hell--were a number of skills. I learned to read and write before I started school, and that built up a sense of self-efficacy, as Albert Bandura would say. And I learned to ingratiate myself with the nurses, since that's where the power was, to get some extra sugar, butter, or a smile and a touch. I also learned to cope with the boredom by inventing group games, like imagining that the beds were all rafts floating down the Nile or the Hudson River.

This experience of extreme isolation at a very formative time in my childhood really gave me a push in the direction of not only being a social psychologist, but of wanting to study things and do things that improve the quality of human life.

CHRISTINA MASLACH: It's important, I think, that one of your classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx, Stanley Milgram, also became a social psychologist of considerable note.

PZ: Yes, we were in the same senior class. He was the smart kid and I was the popular kid. I was even voted most popular boy in the senior class.

But the previous year, which I spent in California at North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia, simply because I was Italian and came from New York--stereotypes in action.

So here I went from being least popular to most popular literally over the summer between junior and senior year in high school.

Talking to Stanley--about whether it was me or the situation that had changed so much--we agreed that it depended upon the situation more than on my disposition.

And Stanley's obedience studies and my Stanford prison experiment are really bookends of the most basic lesson in social psychology--namely, the subtle but pervasive power of situations to influence human behavior, much more so than most of us are aware of.

CM: Your experience in California wasn't the only time you've faced prejudice, was it?

PZ: Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called "dirty Jew boy" because they thought I looked Jewish, even though I wasn't. Then I almost didn't get accepted into Yale University graduate school because many on the psychology faculty thought I was black. And when I was teaching at NYU, I was carrying furniture in from a rented moving van, wearing a bandanna on my head, and some neighbors passed and said to each other, "Oh my God, the Puerto Ricans are moving everywhere."

So I was discriminated against because I was Jewish, Italian, black and Puerto Rican. But maybe the worst prejudice I experienced was against the poor. I grew up on welfare and often had to move in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay the rent. My father was often unemployed. I went to what seemed like warehouses to get clothing and to clinics for health care. During one dentist visit, when I complained of pain, an older dentist told his trainee, "These kinds of people are always complaining. Don't listen to what they say. Just look in their eyes. That'll give you the right signal." Did I ever roll my eyes and blink, trying to send the right "poor person's" signal?

Treating other people as insignificant, as anonymous, as dehumanized, bothered me very much. So one of the things I studied later on was the psychology of deindividuation.

CM: Did anything positive come out of those negative experiences?