Stanford Prison Experiment Professor Philip Zimbardo Was Controversial but His Work Lives On
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The work of Dr. Philip Zimbardo spans decades and includes hundreds of articles, dozens of textbooks, a handful of books, and one experiment that would launch him into infamy for the duration of his career. In 1971 he accepted a tenured position as professor of psychology at Stanford University.
That very same year, he conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment which was soon plagued by controversy and contention.
Zimbardo’s motivation behind this experiment was to explore the “power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity, and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals,” per the Stanford University News Service. Despite its name, this experiment did not do anything for the prison industrial complex.
Zimbardo would go on to study other areas of interest that were still rooted in how a social situation can change a person. Where is he now? Here’s what we know.
Sadly, Professor Philip Zimbardo passed away on Oct. 14, 2024. The Stanford Report eulogized the good doctor in a way befitting a man who devoted most of his life to understanding the human condition.
While the Stanford Prison Experiment was ultimately flawed and met with criticism by Zimbardo’s peers, its impact is still felt today. He always maintained that it’s a cautionary tale about what could happen if we allow external influences to guide us.
Using what he learned from the SPE, Zimbardo drew a connection between actual prison and the feeling of being imprisoned in one’s body. That is how he described shyness, which led to the founding of the Stanford Shyness Clinic in 1977.
According to Psychology Today, Zimbardo’s 1975 article The Social Disease Called Shyness helped launch an entire field of study on the matter. It was still going strong two decades later.
Content retrieved from: https://www.distractify.com/p/professor-zimbardo-now.
