Faculty Spotlight #8

Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D. and Students

Philip G. Zimbardo, the son of Sicilian immigrants who grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s, is internationally
recognized as the voice and face of contemporary psychology. He is known for his PBS TV series
Discovering Psychology, his media appearances, his popular books on shyness, and his classic research,
The Stanford Prison Experiment. He has also been visible as a social and political activist, challenging the
government’s wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the American correctional system.

Dr. Zimbardo has received many awards and honors for service to the profession of psychology as an educator, researcher, and writer. Recently he was awarded the Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition. Stanford professor Benoit Monin has called him “the godfather” of academic psychologists. He has authored more than 350 professional publications and over 50 books, including the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, now in its 18th edition, and Core Concepts in Psychology, now in its 5th edition.

In his course Explorations in Human Nature, PAU students study madness, hypnosis, the psychology of evil,
the social-personal aspects of memory, and the use of social psychology to understand such phenomena as abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and throughout the war zone in Iraq. He explored these concerns in his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.