Philip Zimbardo, a retired professor of psychology at Stanford University, has died at the age of 91.
Zimbardo made history, among others. as the creator of the project known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, as well as the founder of the Shyness Clinic and the author of many books on psychology.
Prof. Zimbardo also visited Poland several times. In Katowice, in Nikiszowiec, there was even an initiative supporting young people, to which the professor gave his name – Zimbardo Center shared information about the scientist’s death on Facebook.
The ancestors of the professor’s wife, Christina Maslach (Krystyna Maślak), also come from Poland. – retired professor of psychology at the University of California. In the 1970s, she analyzed the behavior of participants in a prison experiment initiated by Zimbardo – and was one of the first people to intervene, warning that the experiment is getting out of control.
The Stanford prison experiment was intended to be a research project that, among other things, would check the tendency to radically change behavior in the face of anonymity and would examine the influence of the environment on the actions of individuals. It’s all in the context of a prison life simulation.
A group of Stanford University psychologists led by Philip Zimbardo undertook such an experiment in 1971 in the university’s basement of the psychology department. There, volunteers selected by the researchers played the role of “guards” and “prisoners”.
The experiment exceeded the expectations of its authors – it had to be stopped after six days. The participants became too immersed in their roles and chose the path of aggression. For example, the “guards” were so sadistic towards the people under them that at one point the “prisoners” started a rebellion.
After the intervention of Christina Maslach, who, after analyzing the existing data, drew attention to the disastrous impact of Zimbardo’s experiment on the participants’ psyche, the project was ended. In his conclusions, Zimbardo emphasized, among other things, that under specific conditions, ordinary, mentally healthy people can engage in extreme behaviors, taking on the roles of perpetrators and victims. He emphasized that this was largely influenced by the environment and conditions in which people found themselves.
Zimbardo’s project has been discussed many times by various researchers – there have often been criticisms. The author was accused of, among other things, that due to methodological errors the experiment could not be called a scientific project.
The prison experiment had an impact on its creators – several works based on Zimbardo’s project can be found in popular culture. Among them are films with the same title: “Experiment” from 2001 and 2010.
The professor later focused on the broadly understood social psychology and research on shyness – which gave rise to, among others, the aforementioned Shyness Clinic at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto. Zimbardo also created Heroic Imagination Project foundationwhich promotes the search for positive attitudes among ordinary people. In 2014, the Heroic Imagination Project received the honorary patronage of the Minister of National Education in Poland.
Source: geekweek.interia.pl
