Philip G. Zimbardo, a renowned scholar and educator famed for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, has joined the faculty of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, a private professional school in Palo Alto.
Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, has earned national recognition for, among other things, his 300 publications and the PBS-TV series “Discovering Psychology.”
He is past president of the American Psychological Association and of the Western Psychological Association.
As a member of the Pacific graduate school faculty, Zimbardo will contribute to the continuing design and development of the PGSP/Stanford Psy.D Consortium doctoral program. According to James N. Breckenridge, Ph.D., director of clinical training for the consortium, Zimbardo has a special talent at uncovering and articulating the psychological forces that shape important social and clinical problems.
An encouraging mentor to graduate students, Zimbardo’s workshops and publications on teaching have long inspired the academic psychology community to seek new levels of creativity and enthusiasm in teaching.
“Dr. Zimbardo’s expertise in the areas of shyness, madness, violence, hypnosis, the impact of prison environments and terrorism make him an excellent addition to PGSP’s team of evidence-based professors,” said Dr. Allen Calvin, president of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology.
“While the faculty and I are overjoyed to have Phil on board, the students will be the real winners.”
Zimbardo and other Stanford researchers began the prison experiment by randomly assigning student volunteers to be either guards or prisoners in what was to have been a two-week study. But the experiment was ended in six days.
“We had created an overwhelmingly powerful situation,” Zimbardo later reflected, “a situation in which prisoners were withdrawing and behaving in pathological ways, and in which some of the guards were behaving sadistically.”
He compared what resulted with the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse: “As the guards on the night shift became ever more bored with their long 8-hour shift, they began to use the prisoners as play things for their amusement, believing that their actions were not under surveillance during the night (they were secretly videotaped for subsequent viewing).
“I then discovered they would get them to simulate sodomy and other homophobic behaviors.
“They also stripped prisoners naked for various offenses, took away their sheets and mattresses, put them in solitary for excessive periods - all of which are mirrored in the behavior of military police in the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Bagdad.”
Zimbardo is a fellow of many major American psychological and scientific societies. He is the recent past chairman of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, representing more than 60 science and mathematics professional societies.
He was awarded the Vision 97 award in 2005 for his lifetime research contributions by the former Czech president Vaclav Havel.
Zimbardo lives in San Francisco.
For more information, visit www.pgsp.edu.
