Stanford prison experiment

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

‘They certainly misunderstood children.’11 4 If you think Dr Muzafer Sherif’s manipulations are outrageous, they pale in comparison to the scenario cooked up seventeen years later. On the face of it, the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Robbers Cave Experiment have a lot in common. Both had twenty-four white, male subjects, and both were designed to prove that nice people can spontaneously turn evil.12 But the Stanford Prison Experiment went a step further. Philip Zimbardo’s study wasn’t just dubious. It was a hoax. My own doubts surfaced on reading Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect, published in 2007. I had always assumed his prison ‘guards’ turned sadistic of their own accord.

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Chains are clapped around their ankles, nylon caps pulled down over their hair and each one gets a number by which he’ll be addressed from this point on. Finally, they’re given a smock to wear and locked behind bars, three to a cell. What happens next will send shockwaves around the world. In a matter of days, the Stanford Prison Experiment spins out of control – and in the process reveals some grim truths about human nature. The basement of Stanford University, August 1971. Source: Philip G. Zimbardo. It started with a group of ordinary, healthy young men. Several of them, when signing on for the study, called themselves pacifists. By the second day things had already begun to unravel. A rebellion among the inmates was countered with fire extinguishers by the guards, and in the days that followed the guards devised all kinds of tactics to break their subordinates.

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Who could help him bring out the worst in people? The psychology professor decided to hire the undergrad as a consultant. ‘I was asked to suggest tactics,’ Jaffe subsequently explained, ‘based on my previous experience as master sadist.’17 For forty years, in hundreds of interviews and articles, Philip Zimbardo steadfastly maintained that the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment received no directives. That they’d thought it all up themselves: the rules, the punishments and the humiliations they inflicted on the prisoners. Zimbardo portrayed Jaffe as just another guard who – like the others – got swept up in the experiment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So You've Been Publicly Shamed
by Jon Ronson
Published 9 Mar 2015

were it not for my freedom to visit the Explorations Cafe and Vista Lounge whenever I liked), at no point, even on the worst nights, did I turn into someone from the Stanford Prison Experiment. What had really gone on in that basement? * Nowadays John Mark works as a medical coder for the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente. But for six days back in 1971 he was one of Zimbardo’s ‘guards’. Tracking down the participants hadn’t been an easy task - Zimbardo has never released all of their names - but John Mark has published letters about his memories of the experiment in the Stanford alumni magazine, which was how I discovered him. ‘What happens when you tell people you were a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment?’ I asked him over the telephone.

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I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane. And there’s another explanation. One psychology experiment more than any other has kept his idea alive. It’s the one created in a basement at Stanford University in 1971 by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo. * Zimbardo was a working-class New York City boy, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954 he taught psychology at Yale and NYU and Columbia before ending up at Stanford in 1971. Crowd theory - or ‘deindividuation’ as it was by then known - preoccupied Zimbardo so deeply that in 1969 he wrote a kind of prose poem to it: ‘The ageless life force, the cycle of nature, the blood ties, the tribe, the female principle, the irrational, the impulsive, the anonymous chorus, the vengeful furies.’

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So the question we have to ask - which “contagion” can’t answer - is how come people can come together, often spontaneously, often without leadership, and act together in ideologically intelligible ways. If you can answer that, you get a long way towards understanding human sociality. That is why, instead of being an aberration, crowds are so important and so fascinating.’ * Philip Zimbardo’s assistant emailed. ‘Unfortunately he is declining all further interview obligations until mid fall due to a full schedule.’ It was February. I asked her if maybe she could let me know if he was going to be involved in any deindividuation projects. She said she wouldn’t. ‘I receive many many many requests of this sort daily and simply cannot keep up with the requests to remember to be in touch with individuals.’

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996); Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 111; Raine and Yang, “Neural Foundations.” 66. P. G. Zimbardo, C. Maslach, and C. Haney, “Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, Transformations, Consequences,” in Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, ed. T. Blass, (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), p. 194; Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 32; T. Carnahan and S. McFarland, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment.” See also the excellent follow-on article that expands on Carnahan and McFarland's findings: S. A. Haslam and S.

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In some sense then, most of us are indeed capable of horrendous acts, but it may be that people with different neurological underpinnings would be induced to commit those acts much more easily and for very different reasons. In relation to these ideas, Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, recently published The Lucifer Effect—a “penetrating investigation” of his famous 1971 Stanford Prison experiment involving college students who proved themselves capable of becoming sadistic prison guards or abjectly submissive prisoners. Zimbardo drew sweeping conclusions to the effect that it was the situation alone that drew these “good people” into doing “evil.”

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The syndrome is caused by the loss of a tiny snippet of roughly 21 genes on chromosome 7. 5-HT1B role in aggression, 71 5-HT2A role in self-mutilation, anorexia, and suicide, 71 5-HT3A influence on amygdala and reaction time, 71–72 abandonment, frantic attempts to avoid, as DSM-IV trait of borderline personality disorder, 135, 159–60 abstract reasoning dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and, 203 in psychopaths and dysfunction in right anterior superior temporal gyrus, 97–98 relation to love, empathy, guilt, and remorse, 100 Abu Ghraib, questionable nature of Philip Zimbardo's conclusions regarding, as described in The Lucifer Effect, 303–304n abuse. See child abuse academia difficulty of eradicating older beliefs about nurture in, 38, 38n ease with which Machiavellian students can manipulate altruistic—or narcissistic—professors, 338n importance of remembering names, 312 and its sinister aspects compared with other groups, 30 monolithic nature of American public education system provides ready cover for Machiavellians, 336–37 neurologically speaking, teaching ethics really is just preaching to the choir, 322 students serve as indentured servants for Machiavellians, 320n Texas Southern University as example of “stable sinister system,” 278–80 acting out, 37 actors and throwaway quip about mirror neurons, 104n Adams, Abigail, on George Washington: if he wasn't the best intentioned man in the world he'd be very dangerous, 300 addictive behavior alcoholism of author's mother, uncles, grandfathers, 26, 122–28 borderline personality disorder and, 80, 140, 205 of Carolyn, 141–42, 324, 341–42 chromosome 2 region and genetic tendency toward, 160 MAO-A, “Cluster B” disorders and, 80 Milosevic, drinking and stress, 161 related to drug and sex addiction, 233 Russian propensity for, 177–78 serotonin transporters and, 73 stress, genetics, and, 66 drug addiction borderline personality disorder and, 140, 205 COMT gene and, 79 MAO-A “Cluster B” disorders and, 80 Mao's, 217, 232–33, 245, 248 relation to alcoholism and sex addiction, 233 sexual addiction general discussion of, 233–34 Mao's, 232–34 substance abuse borderline personality disorder and, 140 DARPP-32 and, 820 MAO-A and, 82–83 produces prefrontal cortex dysfunction in antisocial personality disorder, 204–205 Adorno, Theodor W.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

Gina Perry et al., ‘Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test’, Social Psychology Quarterly, 22 Aug. 2019; https://doi.org/10.1177/0190272519861952 22.  Philip Zimbardo, ‘Our inner heroes could stop another Abu Ghraib’, Guardian, 29 Feb. 2008; https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/feb/29/iraq.usa 23.  Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). 24.  Thibault Le Texier, ‘Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment’, American Psychologist 74, no. 7 (Oct. 2019): pp. 823–39; https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401 25.  The debate continues and Zimbardo has responded to the criticisms. For example, see Philip Zimbardo, ‘Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment’, 23 June 2018; https://static1.squarespace.com/static/557a07d5e4b05fe7bf112c19/t/5dee52149d16d153cba11712/1575899668862/Zimbardo2018-06-23.pdf.

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An experiment by Cuddy and her colleagues in 2010 had found that, compared to those who were asked to sit with arms folded or slouched forward, people who were made to power-pose not only felt more powerful, but had higher risk tolerance in a betting game and had increased levels of testosterone and decreased levels of the stress hormone cortisol.15 Cuddy’s message that people who used the two-minute power pose could ‘significantly change the outcomes of their life’ struck a chord: hers became the second-most-watched TED talk ever, with over 73.5 million views in total.16 It was followed in 2015 by Cuddy’s New York Times-bestselling self-help book, Presence, whose publisher informed us that it presented ‘enthralling science’ that could ‘liberate [us] from fear in high-pressure moments’.17 Provoking quite some degree of mockery, the UK’s Conservative Party seemed to take Cuddy’s message to heart, with a spate of photos appearing that same year of their politicians adopting the wide-legged stance at various conferences and speeches.18 Alas, also in 2015, when another team of scientists tried to replicate the power-posing effects, they found that while power-posers did report feeling more powerful, the study ‘failed to confirm an effect of power posing on testosterone, cortisol, and financial risk’.19 The critical spotlight that was activated in the replication crisis has also been aimed at older pieces of psychology research, with similarly worrying results. Perhaps the most famous psychology study of all time is the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where psychologist Philip Zimbardo split a group of young men into mock ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’, and had them stay for a week in a simulated prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department. Disturbingly quickly, according to Zimbardo, the ‘guards’ began to punish the ‘prisoners’, abusing them so sadistically that Zimbardo had to end the experiment early.20 Along with Stanley Milgram’s 1960s studies of obedience, which found many participants willing to administer intense electric shocks to hapless ‘learners’ (the shocks and the learners were both fake, but the participants didn’t know it), Zimbardo’s experiment is held up as one of the prime pieces of evidence for the power of the situation over human behaviour.21 Put a good person into a bad situation, the story goes, and things might get very bad, very fast.

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He used the findings of his experiment, for example, to testify as an expert witness at the trials of the US military guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that the situation the guards were in, and the roles they were made to take on, were the reasons for their shocking abuse and torture of their prisoners.22 Although its implications have always been controversial, only recently have we begun to see just how poor a study the Stanford Prison Experiment was.23 In 2019, the researcher and film director Thibault Le Texier published a paper entitled ‘Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment’, where he produced never-before-seen transcripts of tapes of Zimbardo intervening directly in the experiment, giving his ‘guards’ very precise instructions on how to behave – going as far as to suggest specific ways of dehumanising the prisoners, like denying them the use of toilets.24 Clearly, this heavily stage-managed production was far from an organic example of what happens when ordinary humans are assigned specific social roles.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

In their 1983 book: Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord, Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1983). On the cover of Guyland: Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo: Philip Zimbardo, “The Demise of Guys?” TED Talk, March 2011. http://www.ted.com/talks/zimchallenge.html. This is the argument: Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1986). More recently, Baumeister put that theory: Roy F.

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At frat parties they hook up with actual women, but for the most part, the women represent a threat to their way of existence. The recurring anthem he comes across is “Bros before hos.” The difference between them and the women, though, is that they are more likely to get stuck in Guyland, fail to graduate, and then never move on. So entrenched is this universal frat boy culture that Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is coining a new disease to describe it: “social intensity syndrome.” Many young men these days, Zimbardo argues, are so awash in video games and porn that they cannot cope with face-to-face contact. Their brains, he says, become “digitally rewired” and no longer suitable for stable romantic relationships, especially relationships with “equal status female mates.”

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Many fellow journalists, academics, and luminaries I have spoken to and argued with along the way—most of whom have been thinking about these subjects a lot longer than I have—forced me to rethink or expand or delete: Nancy Abelmann, Dan Abrams, Elizabeth Armstrong, Jeffrey Arnett, Kathleen Bogle, Kate Bolick, Meredith Chivers, June Carbone, James Chung, Alice Eagly, Kathy Edin, Albert Esteve, Susan Faludi, Garanz Franke-Ruta, Claudia Goldin, Michael Greenstone, Daniel Griffin, Metta Lou Henderson, Gregory Higby, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ann Hulbert, Arianna Huffington, Maria Kefalas, Laurel Kendall, Michael Kimmel, David Lapp, Maud Lavin, Lori Leibovich, Mark Leibovich, Daniel Lichter, Wendy Manning, Amanda Marcotte, Marta Meana, Sharon Meers, Tom Mortenson, Linda Perlstein, Zhenchao Qian, Mark Regnerus, Amanda Ripley, Katie Roiphe, Sheryl Sandberg, Amanda Schaffer, Larry Summers, Rebecca Traister, Bruce Weinberg, Richard Whitmire, Brad Wilcox, Philip Zimbardo. Each has in some way, either through their writing or in conversation, helped shape my thoughts. Thank you also to Evan Ramstad, Krys Lee, Frank Ahrens, and SungHa Park for making Korea seem like the most exciting country ever. As with every project, I owe the most to the people who agreed to be written about.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

Seriously, does “Pow, Mommy, pow” sound like a kid who didn’t eat the marshmallow? So what gives? How do a bunch of impulsive hedonists raised far from the storied incubators of athletic excellence end up rewriting the rule book on human potential? The short answer, of course, is flow. The long answer is where Philip Zimbardo comes back into our story. THE IMPORTANCE OF TIME PERSPECTIVES It started with illness. When Philip Zimbardo was five years old, he got a bad case of whooping cough and a worse case of pneumonia. This was 1939, New York. Zimbardo’s family was too poor for private care, so he was sent to the charity ward of the Willard Parker Hospital for Children with Contagious Diseases.

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When interviewed fourteen years later, the kids who could wait were more self-confident, hard-working, and self-reliant. They could handle stress better and could handle tests better. Those who resisted at four ended up scoring 210 points higher on their SATs at sixteen. This may not sound like that much, but, as fellow Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains: “[That] is as large as the average difference recorded between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families who parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school.

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Similar research run with amateur (i.e., nonmilitary) snipers found that flow cut the time it took to teach novices to shoot like experts by 50 percent. This means that flow doesn’t just provide a joyful, self-directed path toward mastery—it literally shortens the path. SEEING LINES When Philip Zimbardo said that the success of Western civilization has been based upon a future-orientated time perspective, he was describing the “struggle now, salvation later” hypothesis of the Protestant work ethic. This ethic is among the reasons the mothers, marshmallows, and musicians ideas have become so wildly popular: they confirm what we already want to believe.

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation
by Chris Nodder
Published 4 Jun 2013

Retrieved January 2013. 4-chan description: Nick Douglas. “What The Hell Are 4chan, ED, Something Awful, And /b/?” (Gawker.com). January 18, 2008. Retrieved January 2013. Use anonymity to encourage repressed behaviors Stanford prison experiment: A good introduction is available on the Stanford Prison Experiment site at prisonexp.org. Deindividuation: Philip Zimbardo. “The human choice: Individuation, reason and order vs. deindividuation, impulse and chaos.” In W. J Arnold and D Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation 17 (1969): 237–307. Online disinhibition: John Suler. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.”

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However, protest marches can soon turn into riots because the anonymity of being in a large crowd and the feeling of being part of a group that reinforces your attitudes are both states that encourage behavior that individuals wouldn’t normally engage in. This behavior can be either positive or negative. Interestingly, the “deindividuating” effect of anonymity and group membership is true both of the protesters and of the group policing the event. Philip Zimbardo performed one of the key psychological studies that investigated this effect. Called the Stanford prison study, Zimbardo randomly assigned 24 individuals to be either prisoners or guards in a cell block constructed at Stanford University’s psychology department. The study was designed to last 2 weeks but had to be stopped after only 6 days because the participants had taken on their roles a little too well.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

When he drove home, later that night, he telephoned his best friend. He told him, ‘I have done something terribly bad.’ This was not an isolated incident. Similar incidents had been occurring for years. Ultimately, the scam was pulled in more than seventy restaurants across the United States. ‘The point is that this did not happen occasionally,’ Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, tells me. ‘If it happened just once or twice, you’d say, “Gee, how dumb are these people? How gullible?” But it worked most of the time. The scenario that was created was so compelling that people got trapped in it.’ Zimbardo served as an expert witness in one of the trials that related to the so-called ‘strip-search scams’.

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If they are motivated, as they frequently insist, by altruistic concern over the dangers of supernatural belief, why do they not obsess over jihadist Muslims, homophobic Christians or racist Jewish settlers? Why this focus on stage psychics, ghost-hunters and alt-med hippies? And isn’t the scene before me precisely the kind of thing that the Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo warns against? The first two steps in his recipe for evil – assign yourself a role, and become a member of a group. ‘Groups can have powerful influences on individual behaviour,’ he said. Weren’t his doomed prison guards just like this: bonded by their fight, and their perceived superiority, in opposition to a common enemy?

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French et al., ‘Psychological aspects of the alien contact experience’, Cortex 44 (2008), pp. 1387–95. 5: ‘Solidified, intensified, gross sensations’ page 53 plenty of sound evidence for the efficacy of meditation: Michael Bond, ‘Putting meditation to the test’, New Scientist, 11 January 2011. 67 the events that spiralled from a single phone call to a Kentucky branch of McDonald’s: Andrew Wolfson, ‘A Hoax Most Cruel’, Courier Journal, 9 October 2005. ABC Primetime Special, originally broadcast 10 November 2005. ‘Strip Search Case Closed?’ ABC news website, 30 November 2006. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Rider, 2007, pp. 279–81. 70 In a 2012 paper, neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith: Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions’, Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, Biological Sciences, p. 367. 71 In 1951, Professor Stanley Milgram’s boss, Dr Solomon Asch: S.

Born in Flames
by Bench Ansfield
Published 15 Aug 2025

But in Wilson and Kelling’s essay, only one empirical source shoulders the evidentiary burden of proving the connection between one broken window and “a thousand broken windows”—of proving, in other words, the connection between visual cues of disorder and neighborhood deterioration. That source was an experiment conducted fifteen years earlier in both the Bronx and Palo Alto by social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, best known for administering the Stanford prison experiment two years later.52 In 1969, Zimbardo, a Stanford professor raised in the Bronx, set about determining the relationship between community anonymity and vandalism. He and his research team installed a 1959 Oldsmobile in both the South Bronx and Palo Alto, removing the vehicles’ license plates and raising their hoods to create the appearance of abandonment.

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.: Grand Concourse; Morrisania neighborhood arson blamed on residents of, 29, 120, 124 Jimmy Carter’s visit to, 114, 162–63, 166, 168, 178, 181, 211, 233, 233–34, 237, 239, 245 extraction by landlords in, 84 fire watching in, 101, 102–9, 105 fireproof housing in, 80–81 gentrification of, 190 landlord abandonment in, 62–63, 229 legacy of interracial solidarity in, 53 New York FAIR plan in, 49 NYPIUA payouts for losses in, 92 Occupied Look program in, 190–92 and “planned shrinkage,” 55–56 police presence in, 189 refugees in and from, 113–15 revitalization efforts in, 200–2, 240, 245–46 as symbol of America’s urban ruin, 107–9, 162, 163, 166, 168, 185, 261, 303; see also Fort Apache, the Bronx (1981 film) tourism in, 163, 168, 216 as tourist destination, 163, 216 unemployment in, 78 as uninsurable area, 248, 251 vandalism in, 185 as welfare dumping ground, 128 Philip Zimbardo’s “anonymity” experiment in, 186–87 South Bronx Development Organization (SBDO), 182, 245 South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation (SoBro), 260, 261 South Bronx Rising (Jonnes), 306 South East Bronx Community Organization (SEBCO), 106, 238, 241, 244 South Fordham neighborhood (Bronx), 98, 219 South Fordham Organization, 98 Southeast Asian refugees, 316, 324 Southern Boulevard (Bronx), 3–4 Southern District of New York, 147, 202 Soviet Union, 4, 216 Special Portfolio, 147, 148 Spielberg, Morris, 31 squatters, 229 Stanford prison experiment, 186 Stanford Research Institute, 204 Stanford University, 186, 187, 276 Star-Ledger (Newark), 31 Starr, Roger, 55, 185, 232 State Farm, 252, 253, 256 state-based insurance regulation, 25, 30, 253; See also McCarran-Ferguson Act (1945) statistics, 42, 86, 119, 124, 125, 129, 223, 275–76 Statue of Liberty, 133, 134 Steinbach, Carol, 225 Sterling, Lee, 63 Sternlieb, George, 64 Stevenson, Gelvin, 84 STOP.

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The passersby the experiment had intended to study had turned into observers of the action, and joined in only after the car was already destroyed. For Zimbardo, what happened in the Bronx and at Stanford suggested that crowd mentality, social inequalities, and community anonymity could prompt “good citizens” to act destructively. “Vandalism is a rebellion with a cause,” he wrote.54 Philip Zimbardo and his graduate students getting “carried away” on the campus of Stanford University. By contrast, Wilson and Kelling found in Zimbardo’s study proof that “one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.” What is significant to note here is the work the Bronx performed in the making of Wilson and Kelling’s theory.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
by Bandy X. Lee
Published 2 Oct 2017

News and World Report, April 21. www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2017-04-21/mental-health-professionals-debate-ethics-in-the-age-of-trump. PART 1 THE TRUMP PHENOMENON UNBRIDLED AND EXTREME PRESENT HEDONISM How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again He Is Unfit for Duty PHILIP ZIMBARDO AND ROSEMARY SWORD In the summer of 2015, we commenced what would become an ongoing discussion about Donald Trump. He had just thrown his hat in the ring as a Republican presidential candidate, and our initial conversation was brief: he was in it for the publicity. For us, as for many Americans, Donald Trump had been in the periphery of our consciousness for years, first as a well-publicized New York City businessman and later as a mediocre television personality.

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This vetting process frequently includes psychological testing in the form of exams or quizzes to help the employer make more informed hiring decisions and determine if the prospective employee is honest and/or would be a good fit for the company. These tests are used for positions ranging from department store sales clerk to high-level executive. Isn’t it time that the same be required for candidates for the most important job in the world? Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, is a scholar, educator, and researcher. Zimbardo is perhaps best known for his landmark Stanford prison study. Among his more than five hundred publications are the best seller The Lucifer Effect and such notable psychology textbooks as Psychology: Core Concepts, 8th edition, and Psychology and Life, now in its 20th edition.

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utm_term=.961fefcee834. Stetka, Bret. 2017. “As Presidents Live Longer, Doctors Debate Whether to Test for Dementia.” NPR, February 17. www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/02/17/514583390/as-our-leaders-live-longer-calls-for-presidential-dementia-testing-grow-louder. Sword, Rosemary, and Philip Zimbardo. 2016a. “Bullies.” PsychologyToday.com, January 24. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-time-cure/201601/bullies. ______. 2016b. “The Narcissistic Personality: A Guide to Spotting Narcissists.” PsychologyToday.com, March 29. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-time-cure/201603/the-narcissistic-personality.

SuperFreakonomics
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Published 19 Oct 2009

Orne, “On the Social Psychological Experiment: With Particular Reference to Demand Characteristics and Their Implications,” American Psychologist 17, no. 10 (1962). / 123 “Why Nazi officers obeyed”: see Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963). / 123 The Stanford prison experiments: see Craig Haney, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973). “IMPURE ALTRUISM”: Americans as top givers: see “International Comparisons of Charitable Giving,” Charities Aid Foundation briefing paper, November 2006.

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In a 1961–62 study designed to understand why Nazi officers obeyed their superiors’ brutal orders, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram got volunteers to follow his instructions and administer a series of increasingly painful electric shocks—at least they thought the shocks were painful; the whole thing was a setup—to unseen lab partners. In 1971, the Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a prison experiment, with some volunteers playing guards and others playing inmates. The guards started behaving so sadistically that Zimbardo had to shut down the experiment. When you consider what Zimbardo and Milgram got their lab volunteers to do, it is no wonder that the esteemed researchers who ran the Dictator game, with its innocuous goal of transferring a few dollars from one undergrad to another, could, as List puts it, “induce almost any level of giving they desire.”

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
by Kevin Dutton
Published 15 Oct 2012

Doran and Company, 1915). 20 As a case in point, Diana Falkenbach and Maria Tsoukalas … Falkenbach and Tsoukalas, “Can Adaptive Psychopathic Traits Be Observed in Hero Populations?” Poster presented at the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy Conference. Montreal, Canada, May 2011. 21 Philip Zimbardo, founder of the Heroic Imagination Project … To find out more about the Heroic Imagination Project, visit its website at http://heroicimagination.org/. 22 In 1971, in an experiment which has long since been inaugurated … Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Power and Pathology of Imprisonment,” Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner’s Rights: California, Congressional Record, Serial No. 15, October 25, 1971.

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On the other hand, however, they part company with criminal psychopaths in their relative absence of traits related to the Self-Centered Impulsivity subscale (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, carefree nonplanfulness, and antisocial behavior). These dials are turned down lower. Such a profile is consistent with the anatomy of the hero as portrayed by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, founder of the Heroic Imagination Project—an initiative aimed at educating folk in the insidious techniques of social influence. Or more specifically, how to resist them. In 1971, in an experiment that has long since been inaugurated into psychology’s hall of fame, Zimbardo constructed a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building and randomly assigned twelve student volunteers to play the role of prisoner, while another twelve were to play the role of guard.

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Rationalizations included “The Japanese would never dare attempt a full-scale surprise assault against Hawaii because they would realize that it would precipitate an all-out war, which the United States would surely win”; and “Even if the Japanese were foolhardy enough to send their carriers to attack us [the United States], we could certainly detect and destroy them in plenty of time.” History attests they were wrong. As an example of the expediency of psychological troubleshooting, and of the spiritual qualities of fearlessness and mental toughness inherent in heroic action, both the Challenger and Pearl Harbor fiascoes provide intriguing parallels between the work of Philip Zimbardo and that of Diana Falkenbach and Maria Tsoukalas, mentioned earlier. Previously, in chapter 3, we explored the possibility that psychopathic characteristics such as charm, low anxiety, and stress immunity—the characteristics that Falkenbach and Tsoukalas identified in comparatively greater number in hero populations—may well, somewhat ironically, have managed to gain a toehold in our evolutionary gene pool through their propensity to facilitate conflict resolution.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

This is a restatement of the fundamental attribution error. The vital point is that the situation is generally much more powerful than most people—especially Westerners—acknowledge. The combination of the sense of group and the setting lays the groundwork for behavior that can deviate substantially from the norm. Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University, did an experiment in 1971 that ranks with Asch and Milgram in exhibiting the power of the situation. To start, Zimbardo advertised for volunteers in a two-week-long prison experiment, offering $15 a day. He ran the seventy applicants through psychological and physical tests and ended up with twenty-four healthy, mentally stable, middle-class, male students from the Palo Alto, California, area.

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MacGregor, “Imagery and Financial Judgment,” The Journal of Psychology and Financial Markets 3, no. 1 (2002): 15–22. 21. Slovic et al., “The Affect Heuristic,” 408. 22. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 6. 23. Jerry M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist 64, no. 1 (2009): 1–11. 24. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007). 25. Ibid., 210–221. 26. Peter F. Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 74. 27. David Leonhardt, “Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong,” New York Times, February 22, 2006. 28.

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Rex Dalton, “Quarrel Over Book Leads to Call For Misconduct Inquiry,” Nature 431 (October 21, 2004): 889; Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (New York: Free Press, 1998), 365–378; Frederic Townsend, “Birth Order and Rebelliousness: Reconstructing the Research in Born to Rebel,” Politics and the Life Sciences 19, no. 2 (2000): 135–156; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 389–390; and Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 83–114. 3. John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1999), 192. 4. Susan Goldsmith, “Frank’s War,” East Bay Express, April 28, 2004. 5. Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007); Cécile Ernst and Jules Angst, Birth Order: Its Influence on Personality (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983), 284; and Jeremy Freese, Brian Powell, and Lala Carr Steelman, “Rebel Without a Cause or Effect: Birth Order and Social Attitudes,” American Sociological Review 64, no. 2 (1999): 207–231. 6.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

As simulated fishermen, they over fish. As ministers of simulated developing nations, they favor the needs of their industries over the needs of their people. As the upper class, they feather their own nests; as the lower class, they become apathetic or rebellious. So would you. In the famous Stanford prison experiment by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, players even took on, in an amazingly short time, the attitudes and behaviors of prison guards and prisoners.12 Seeing how individual decisions are rational within the bounds of the information available does not provide an excuse for narrow-minded behavior. It provides an understanding of why that behavior arises.

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The term “satisficing” (a merging of “satisfy” and “suffice”) was first used by Herbert Simon to describe the behavior of making decisions that meet needs adequately, rather than trying to maximize outcomes in the face of imperfect information. H. Simon, Models of Man, (New York: Wiley, 1957). 12. Philip G. Zimbardo, “On the Ethics of Intervention in Human Psychological Research: With Special Reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment,” Cognition 2, no. 2 (1973): 243–56) 13. This story was told to me during a conference in Kollekolle, Denmark, in 1973. Chapter Five 1. Paraphrased in an interview by Barry James, “Voltaire’s Legacy: The Cult of the Systems Man,” International Herald Tribune, December 16, 1992, p. 24. 2.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

Slowly, I began to understand what I was witnessing—a hypothetical reenactment of atrocities that occurred at Nazi concentration camps, complete with the subject’s protestations during the debriefing that he didn’t want to do it and tried to stop, but was ordered to continue. I don’t think I’ll ever look at culture the same way again. Even more notorious is the Stanford prison experiment, conducted by the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971. In the two-week experiment conducted in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, Zimbardo randomly assigned volunteers to the roles of guards and prisoners.17 Almost immediately after the experiment began, the “guards” started to behave in a dehumanizing way toward the “prisoners,” subjecting them to verbal harassment, forced exercise, manipulation of sleeping conditions, manipulation of bathroom privileges (some of it physically filthy), and the use of nudity to humiliate the “prisoners.”

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ANTI-GEKKO THERAPIES So far, the tools and techniques we’ve covered address the financial environment, offering feedback either in the form of early warning signals or new narratives for preventing financial crises. We haven’t yet addressed human behavior. How can we prevent the next Bernie Madoff from bilking billions from retirees who thought that he was their friend? How can we prevent real-life Gordon Gekkos from convincing young minds that greed is always good? Psychologist Philip Zimbardo put it succinctly enough: resist situational influences.20 Since his original prison experiment, Zimbardo has investigated how good people can be influenced into doing evil things by their surrounding culture. Zimbardo offers ten key behaviors that he believes will minimize the effectiveness of a destructive culture in spreading its values, whether financial or otherwise.

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Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 23: 19–41. Hamilton, William D. 1964a. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior I.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–16. ___. 1964b. “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior II.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 17–52. Haney, Craig, Curtis Banks, and Philip Zimbardo. 1973a. “Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison.” International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1: 69–97. ___. 1973b. “Study of Prisoners and Guards in a Simulated Prison.” Naval Research Reviews 9: 1–17. Harder, Lawrence D., and Leslie A. Real. 1987. “Why Are Bumble Bees Risk Averse?”

You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself
by David McRaney
Published 29 Jul 2013

There may have been influencers, instigators, or natural leaders, but in the end, everyone in your circle probably dissolved into the mind of the unit. When the principal, parent, or police officer asked, “What were you kids thinking?” you had no answer, because there wasn’t one. You were just reacting, moving as a herd. In 1969, psychologist Philip Zimbardo had female college students deliver painful electric shocks to other female students. Half the students giving the shocks were randomly selected to wear big hoods and roomy lab coats during the experiment, in addition to numbered tags. The other half remained unmasked and wore tags revealing their names.

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Across the board, teachers rated learners who received insults as having less attractive personalities than the ones who got encouragement. The teachers’ behavior created their perception. You tend to like the people to whom you are kind and to dislike the people to whom you are rude. From the Stanford Prison Experiment to Abu Ghraib, to concentration camps and the attitudes of soldiers spilling blood, mountains of evidence suggest that behaviors create attitudes when harming just as they do when helping. Jailers come to look down on inmates; camp guards come to dehumanize their captives; soldiers create derogatory terms for their enemies.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

In subsequent versions of the experiment (there were nineteen in all) Milgram varied the external situational factors to determine the extent to which they altered the degree of obedience.51 Milgram wasn’t really using these experiments to test learners’ memory, but subjects’ compliance. Unbeknownst to the teachers, the learner was actually working with Milgram and was not in fact receiving any shocks. Like the social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the pioneer of the famous Stanford prison experiment, Milgram was trying to identify the situational factors that enable ordinary people to commit evil acts. Why do we mention Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments? Because six of the ten situational factors they identified that led their subjects to commit such horrendous acts could have led us down the path to the dark side of competition (and did).52 One situational factor is to present basic rules that seem to make sense before they are actually put into practice, and then to use them “arbitrarily and impersonally to justify mindless compliance.”53 The way Milgram’s experiment was explained to participants made sense initially (using the effect of a slight penalty—a mild shock—as an incentive to remember).

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Only 6 percent of students who had a low purpose at work said they had great well-being. 49.Bates College, “Purposeful Work: Aligning Who You Are with What You Do,” https://www.bates.edu/purposeful-work/. 50.Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970, https://nyti.ms/2J9d0xS (the incentives are to use the company “resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game”). 51.Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal & Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (October 1963): 371–378, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0040525. 52.Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), 273–75. 53.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 273. 54.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 274. 55.Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 183 (discussing how empathy is one of the most valuable resources in the world, in effectively anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems). 56.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 274. 57.Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” paper presented at the Seventh International World-Wide Web Conference (Brisbane Australia, April 14–18, 1998), http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/. 58.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 274. 59.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 274. 60.Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 274. 61.Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s Magazine, December 1973, 77, https://harpers.org/archive/1973/12/the-perils-of-obedience/. 62.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

With our prefrontal cortex offline, we can’t run those scenarios. We lose access to the most complex and neurotic part of our brains, and the most primitive and reactive part of our brains, the amygdala, the seat of that fight-or-flight response, calms down, too. In his book The Time Paradox,12 Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, one of the pioneers in the field of time perception, describes it this way: “When you are . . . fully aware of your surroundings and of yourself in the present, [this] increases the time that you swim with your head above water, when you can see both potential dangers and pleasures. . . . You are aware of your position and your destination.

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“Time poverty”: Maria Konnikova, No Money, No Time,” New York Times, June 13, 2014. 11. Our sense of time isn’t localized: Much of the timelessness information comes from an author interview with David Eagelman, 2012. Also see David Eagleman, Incognito (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), pp. 51–54. 12. In his book The Time Paradox: Philip Zimbardo, The Time Paradox (New York: Atria, 2009), p. 261. 13. In a recent study published in Psychological Science: Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2011): 1130–36. 14.

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life
by Colin Ellard
Published 14 May 2015

Living in crowded conditions among strangers unleashes a large spectrum of protective impulses that can range from our simple reticence to engage in conversation with the person who sits beside us on a city bus to our reluctance to take a walk through our own neighborhood after dark. All of these responses are, in one way or another, adaptations to unnatural living circumstances that alert us to the presence of risk and so provoke some level of fear or anxiety. Fear of Crime In 1969, Stanford social psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a simple and daring experiment. He parked cars in two different locations: one in a sketchy neighborhood in New York’s Bronx and the other in Palo Alto, California, near his home university. The license plates were removed from the cars and the hoods were raised to suggest that the cars had been left following an episode of mechanical trouble.

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parsons-ellard 7The technical article describing the relationship between neuropeptide S and urban stress was written by Fabian Streit and a large group of collaborators titled “A Functional Variant in the Neuropeptide S Receptor 1 Gene Moderates the Influence of Urban Upbringing on Stress Processing in the Amygdala,” and was published in the journal Stress (2014, Volume 17, pages 352–361). 8Oshin Vartanian describes our preferences for curves and some of its implications for architecture in an article titled “Impact of Contour on Aesthetic Judgments and Approach-Avoidance Decisions in Architecture,” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2011, Volume 110, Supplement 2, pags 10446–10453) Available at: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/Supplement_2/10446.abstract 9The experiments describing the effect of geometric shapes on social judgment by Ursula Hess, Orna Gryc, and Shlomo Hareli appear in a paper titled “How Shapes Influence Social Judgments,” in the journal Social Cognition (2013 Volume 31, pages 72–80). 10The film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, produced and directed in 2011 by Chad Friedrichs, provides an interesting interpretation of the failure of the development based more on prejudice and economics than on architecture. 11The dropped letter method was invented by Stanley Milgram (of the infamous Milgram Experiment) and first reported in an article titled “The Lost-Letter Technique: A Tool of Social Research,” in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly (1965, Volume 29, pages 437–438). 12The article, titled “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” that “broke” the news of broken window theory was published in The Atlantic Monthly (March, 1982 by James Wilson and George Kelling. In part, their theory was based on earlier work by Philip Zimbardo in an article titled “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (1969, Volume 17, pages 237–307). 13A report on the Eurobarometer analysis of the fear of crime, produced by the European Commission, titled “Analysis of Public Attitudes to Insecurity, Fear of Crime and Crime Prevention,” can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_181_sum_en.pdf 14A digest of results from a 2010 Gallup poll assessing fear of crime in the United States, titled “Nearly 4 in 10 Americans Still Fear Walking Alone at Night,” can be found at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/144272/nearly-americans-fear-walking-alone-night.aspx 15This Robert Ornstein quote comes from his 1992 book The Evolution of Consciousness: The Origins of the Way We Think (Simon and Schuster, New York, page 262). 16The official Viennese government description of gender mainstreaming may be found here: https://www.wien.gv.at/english/administration/gendermainstreaming/ A good discussion by Clare Foran of the Viennese policies titled “How to Design a City for Women,” can be found in the Atlantic City Lab blog at: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/09/how-design-city-women/6739/ 17The proportion of unmarried adults in U.S. rose to more than 50 percent according to a widely reported survey conducted by the U.S.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

You should put the filing date on a calendar and plan your work accordingly based on clock time. But when you go to the grocery store, the order and timing of what you do matter less and you care more about effectiveness. You should make a list of items to buy and use event time to make sure you don’t leave the grocery store until you have every ingredient necessary to make dinner. Philip Zimbardo, an emeritus professor at Stanford, is best known for running a controversial experiment in which he locked two dozen student volunteers in the basement of a building at Stanford and randomly assigned half to be “guards” and half to be “prisoners.” (Zimbardo had to end the experiment after six days because the students had so completely taken on their roles.)

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Riley, “Examining Potential Demographic Trends in the Opinions of Undergraduate Journalism Professors Concerning the Topic of Technological and Traditional Journalism Skills and Theories,” master’s thesis, Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University, August 2011, p. 14. Chapter 12 1. Tamar Avnet and Anne-Laure Sellier, “Clock Time Versus Event Time: Temporal Culture or Self-Regulation?” Working Paper Series, December 20, 2010, http:/ssrn.com/abstract=1665936. 2. Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life (Free Press, 2008), p. 30. 3. Zimbardo and Boyd, The Time Paradox, pp. 38, 40. 4. Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (1909). 5. See, for example, Heather Menzies, No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005). 6.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Price, Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 168–69. 45. Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning, 336; Markoff, What the Dormouse Said, 79. 46. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 198–99. 47. Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2008), 236. 48. “Stanford Prison Experiment, August 15–21, 1971,” video recordings, Stanford Libraries, https://exhibits.stanford.edu/spe/browse/video-recordings. 49. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 97. 50. Ibid., 111. 51. Ibid., 39. Chapter 3.4 How to Destroy an Empire 1.

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He ran LSD trips and gathered opposition data about the student New Left, a job description about as bizarre as Hubbard’s uniform: khakis, gold badge, pistol, and a belt strung with bullets.46 And yet Stanford’s most disastrous government experiment didn’t even involve the CIA. The money for social psychologist Philip Zimbardo’s infamous six-day research project in the summer of 1971 came from Stanford’s dear old friends at the Office of Naval Research.47 After the Holocaust, the field of social psychology rose to consider and explore questions of discipline, conformity, and obedience—the most famous being Stanley Milgram’s electroshock trials in which participants were supposed to have believed themselves to be shocking another volunteer on the orders of the experimenter.

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(at least) understood that, to avoid risking another wage-price spiral, they had to deal with crime as a problem of too many criminals rather than too few good jobs. In this period, state authorities expanded their domestic counterinsurgency campaign from left-wing groups to all forms of organization by poor people. The policing strategy called for total domination of the streets, and it was based on research from a familiar figure. Philip Zimbardo, working on a small government grant in the late 1960s, tried a casual experiment with some cars. A couple of years ahead of his famous prison experiment, he abandoned two vehicles, one outside New York University’s South Bronx campus and one outside Stanford. A confederate reported that the New York car was stripped for parts quickly, after which locals turned it into a jungle gym.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
by Paul Verhaeghe
Published 26 Mar 2014

Introduction 1 The best known is the 1963 experiment by Stanley Milgram, in which, after a certain amount of prompting, ordinary people gave dangerous electric shocks (or so they thought) to individuals taking part in what they had been told was a ‘learning experiment’. Around ten years later, Philip Zimbardo carried out his Stanford prison experiment, in which students took their roles as guards so much to heart that it became an Abu Ghraib avant la lettre. Chapter Three: The Perfectible Individual 1 Kołakowski, 2007. Two quotations: ‘… and the possessors of universal truth know that they have access not only to inviolable (“scientific”) knowledge of all essential human affairs but also to the precepts of a perfect society’ (p. 45); ‘Many have pointed out that the principles of empiricism are not themselves empirical propositions.

The Best Business Writing 2013
by Dean Starkman
Published 1 Jan 2013

Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.” The Khannas’ book is not the only piece of literary rubbish carrying the TED brand. Another recently published TED book called The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It—coauthored by Philip Zimbardo, of the Stanford Prison Experiment fame, is an apt example of what transpires when TED ideas happen to good people. One would think that a scholar as distinguished as Zimbardo would not need to set foot in Khanna-land, but, alas, his book brims with almost as many clichés and pseudo-daring pronouncements. Did you know that “in porn, male actors have enormous penises,” and that “porn is not about romance”?

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The Naked and the TED The New Republic No one has mastered the art of the long takedown review quite like Evgeny Morozov. In taking on some new e-books published by the increasingly ubiquitous TED conference brand (Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization, by Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna; The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan; and Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act, by Ron Gutman), Morozov argues that many of the shiny and exciting and easily digestible ideas propagated by TED are actually very dangerous. As he reveals the fallacies of the TED worldview, Morozov offers prose that is as precise as his target is muddled.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War
by James Risen
Published 15 Feb 2014

“Absolutely, there is a consensus in the psychological profession that this was no way to gather accurate information,” agreed Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “There is certainly no scientific basis for believing it.” “It was right out of Clockwork Orange,” added Philip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Zimbardo is a legend among American psychologists. He developed a worldwide reputation with the so-called Stanford prison experiment, in which students were assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a mock prison set up at Stanford in the 1970s. The experiment had to be ended abruptly after it became clear that the role-playing led the students pretending to be guards to quickly become abusive.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

To study radicalization, I started with groupthink and the experiments of the psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s, in which, when confronted with simple questions in twelve critical trials, 75 percent caved in to the pressure of the group rather than sticking to their own conclusions.13 His experiments showed the power of peer pressure and how being part of any group changes each of us. To understand terrorists’ reaction to authority, I turned to the famous experiments of Stanley Milgram (remember “six degrees of separation”?) and Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Milgram found that most people follow instructions, even when told to administer potentially lethal shocks to other people.14 Zimbardo’s study has been challenged, but he stands by his findings: that people lose their individuality and take on the characteristics of the roles they’re given.15 In other words, authority can give us the freedom to be our worst selves.

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I focused our resources on two big goals: spreading empowerment and hope; and fostering debate and engagement. My ideas for the first goal built on what I had learned while studying terrorism and mob violence in Indonesia. I relied on ideas from social network theory, the experiments of the psychologists Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, and Philip Zimbardo, and the Three Degrees of Influence idea, that everything we say or do impacts our friends, our friends’ friends, and even our friends’ friends’ friends. Our network’s focus group discussions showed us that Filipino youths were dissatisfied and disillusioned with our country’s political processes.

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When the “learner,” hidden by a screen, fails to memorize word pairs fast enough, the “helper,” or test subject, applies an electric shock, increasing the voltage with each wrong answer. Milgram found that most people follow instructions to give what would have been potentially lethal shocks despite the screams and pleas of the “learner.” 15.In his experiment, Stanford University students were asked to become either a prisoner or a guard in an experiment that was supposed to last two weeks. It was cut short in less than a week because the guards became sadistic. 16.Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, “Links,” Connected, 2011, http://connectedthebook.com/pages/links.html. 17.See Connected (home page), 2011, http://connectedthebook.com. 18.John T.

The Behavioral Investor
by Daniel Crosby
Published 15 Feb 2018

Upset with this small uprising, the guards retaliated, placing offending prisoners in solitary confinement and denying them food and water. The guards eventually subjected some prisoners to searing verbal taunts, instructed compliant prisoners to harass and belittle the noncompliant, and forced them to urinate and defecate in small buckets that they would not allow to be emptied. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist overseeing the study, became so enthralled by the interactions that he was impervious to the ill treatment the prisoners were receiving. It was only when his then-girlfriend (now wife) Christina Maslach came by to interview some of the subjects that she pointed out the horrors being perpetrated and encouraged Zimbardo to shut down the experiment.

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One of the most infamous psychological studies ever conducted, commonly cited to demonstrate the corruptive influence of power, also serves as a powerful tutorial on the human tendency to reify the present and project it into the future indefinitely. Any Psych 100 course is likely to feature discussion about the Stanford prison experiment – a mock prison set up in the basement of the psychology department to study the impact of the power differential between prisoners and their guards. Twenty-four men, mostly white, mostly middle class, were recruited for the study and were arbitrarily assigned to either a “guard” or “prisoner” condition.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
by Amanda Montell
Published 14 Jun 2021

Personally, I don’t see the appeal (unpopular opinion, I guess, but Jones’s blocky, cartoonish features have always reminded me a little of Biff Tannen, the bully from Back to the Future). I suppose deranged murderers might just not be my type, though I know that hybristophilia, an attraction to brutish criminals, is a very real thing. Jones, Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson all had groupies. Even the famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the guy known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, openly commented on Jones’s irresistible “sexual appeal.” But sex appeal isn’t just looks—it’s an ability to craft the illusion of intimacy between yourself and your fans. That’s what Jonestown expats remember. Each one I spoke to rhapsodized about the man’s impossible charm, his knack for seamlessly relating to anyone, from white upper-middle-class bohemians to Black folks active in the church.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
by Ted Conover
Published 20 Jan 2010

It’s payback time!” Those who had been abused now got to wreak vengeance, and some did it with gusto. A tubby, mild-mannered recruit named Emminger, harshly flipped onto the mat, suffered torn ligaments in his shoulder and was sent off to the emergency room of a local hospital. It reminded me of Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment at Stanford—now recounted at every police academy and introductory psychology course—where the students who were assigned to “guard” fellow students who were playing inmates often acted with excessive zeal, even with brutality. The experiment seemed to demonstrate the way even seemingly decent people could be corrupted by undue authority.

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highest rates of divorce: I was unable to independently verify Puma’s claims. Concomitant with the rise of imprisonment: The Corrections Yearbook 1982, Pound Ridge, N.Y.: Criminal Justice Institute, 1983, p. 33, and The Corrections Yearbook 1988, Middletown, Conn.: Criminal Justice Institute, 1999, p. 133. It reminded me of Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment: C. Haney, C. Banks, and P. Zimbardo, “Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison,” International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1973, pp. 69–97. Zimbardo has since accepted some criticism: “Zimbardo’s Prison—Renowned professor calls 1970s prison experiment unethical,” The Stanford Daily Online, 14 May 1996.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
by Matthew Sweet
Published 13 Feb 2018

I imagined a room of sober young men passing resolutions against the military-industrial complex. Now I think of it as a phenomenon of a different order. Something through which we might read the times, like the psychedelic bus trip undertaken by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters; or the Stanford Prison Experiment, inside which the psychologist Philip Zimbardo barricaded a group of impressionable boys and watched them sink into barbarism. To describe the experiences of all those whose lives were touched by the committee would require more than a book. It would require an immense illuminated map of the world, and an army of uniformed croupiers pushing stacks of color-coded tokens in the direction of Sweden.

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Shunning process Sigal, Clancy Sigerson, John Sigerson, Renee Simpsons, The (TV show) Singing Callicoats 681st Glider Field Artillery Battalion Sjörgren, Olle Sjöwall, Maj Small Giants (Burlingham) Smith, Parker Soble, Jack Social Democratic Party (Denmark) Social Democratic Party (Sweden) Socialist International Socialist Workers Party (SWP) Södermalm district Sons of the American Revolution Sontag, Susan Soros, George Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee Soviet Education Soviet Embassy (Tokyo) Soviet Psychology Soviet Union (USSR). See also Russia Spain Spannaus, Edward Spannaus, Nancy Spång, Klas-Örjan Special Operations Group (CIA) Speed, Dennis Spender, Stephen Spicer, Sean Spock, Benjamin Spray, Archibald (Marshall Zolp) Stalin, Joseph Stallone, Sylvester Standard Oil Company Stanford Prison Experiment Stasi State Department Staton, Billy Steinbeck, John Steppenwolf St. John Bosco High School Stockholm Stockholm Research Collective Stockholm University Stone, Roger Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, “Star Wars”) 175 Strollo, Vincent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) Suall, Irwin Suburban Life Sullivan, Ed Svahnström, Bertil Swarthmore College Sweden deserters find asylum in draft resisters find exile in EAP and elections of 1968 elections of 1979 elections of 2014 GLADIO and Palme assassination and political neutrality of public cools toward American exiles in Vale moves to welfare state withdraws asylum for deserters Sweden: Heaven and Hell (film) Swedish Aliens Commission Swedish anti-war movement Swedish Committee for Vietnam Swedish Death Index “Swedish Deserters” (CIA précis) Swedish Film Institute Swedish intelligence Swedish Ministry of the Interior Swedish National Archives Swedish police Sylvia, Robert Symbionese Liberation Army Syvriotis, Nick Takman, John Talbott, Strobe Tarpley, Webster Tate, Charles Tavistock Institute Taxi Driver (film) Taylor, Thomas Tegin-Gaddy, Kerstin Temple University, Third World Solidarity rally Terrorists, The (Sjöwall and Wahlöö) Terry Whitmore, for Example (film) There Are No Naughty Children (Israel and Israel) They Would Have Died Anyway (Ekberg) Third State of Imperialism, The (LaRouche) Thorsson, Inga Three Fs of Charm, The (Foley) Tibet Tidsignal (student newspaper) Time Time to Live, A (film) Tito, Josip Broz Tokyo University Tomkiewicz, Stanislaus Torres, Jose Torsåker farm torture Tracy, Spencer Trap, The (TV drama) Treml, Vladimir Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Trier, Lars von Trotsky, Leon Trotskyists Trotsky: The Prophet Armed (Deutscher) Trump, Donald Trump, Melania Tuesday (newspaper supplement) Turgenev, Ivan Turk, Larry Turkish-Syrian border Turner, Stansfield Tyresö suburb UFOs Ukraine Ulvaeus, Björn Umiliani, Piero Underground Railway Underwood, Lamont Claxton Union of American Exiles in Britain United Committee of South Slavic Americans United Nations Conference on the Human Environment United Press International (UPI) U.S.

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

Murray and MacKinnon’s Improvisations anticipated, by several decades, Stanley Milgram’s 1961 experiments on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience, in which volunteers, playing the role of a “teacher,” were directed to administer increasingly powerful shocks to a screaming “learner” when he answered questions incorrectly, and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which college students assigned to play the role of prison guards abused and tortured college students assigned to play the role of prisoners. More immediately, Station S’s role-play resonated with critical theorist and German émigré Theodor Adorno’s theories of fascism, which he was developing at the same time Murray and MacKinnon were watching their test subjects scream and slap and pretend to shoot one another in the basement of the Willard estate.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

Branches and subbranches of such exchanges could continue for months, making up a kind of electronically embedded ad hoc literature. That was where the "hacker papers" came from. This particular counterpoint of flames on the subject of hackers, written by hackers, came to the attention of the "real world" because a Stanford professor of psychology named Philip Zimbardo discovered the dialogue and published it, with commentary, in Psychology Today magazine in 1980, twenty years after Rodman met Greenblatt et al. in Building 26. The exchange of flames began with a hacker's version of Luther's 95 theses, nailed, metaphorically, to the door of the electronic temple.

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Crocker, "The Greenblatt Chess Program," Conference Proceedings, American Federation of Information Processing Societies, vol. 31 (1967), 801-810. [3] Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco" W. H. Freeman, 1976), 2-3. [4] Ibid., 116. [5] Ibid., 118-119. [6] Philip Zimbardo, "Hacker Papers," Psychology Today, August 1980, 63. [7] Ibid., 67-68 [8] Frank Rose, "Joy of Hacking," Science 82, November 1982, 66. Chapter Nine: The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Thinker [1] Vannevar Bush, As We May Think," the Atlantic Monthly, August 1945. [2] Nilo Lindgren, "Toward the Decentralized Intellectual Workshop," Innovation, No. 24, September 1971

Buried in Treasures: Help for Compulsive Acquiring, Saving, and Hoarding
by David Tolin , Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee
Published 14 Dec 2013

Sorting and letting go will become harder and harder unless you are doing it on a frequent and regular basis. Clutter Is a Magnet for Clutter In the 1980s, social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling proposed what they called the “broken windows theory” of urban crime. They read about a famous study by psychologist Philip Zimbardo in which he left a car sitting in a nice neighborhood for 1 week. The car went untouched until Zimbardo smashed one of the car’s windows. Within a day, the car had been completely stripped by thieves and vandals. Wilson and Kelling theorized that the presence of physical neglect or decay leads to a perception of disorder and chaos, leading people to behave accordingly.

The Talent Code: Greatest Isn't Born, It's Grown, Here's How
by Daniel Coyle
Published 27 Apr 2009

PSYCHOLOGY The Shyness Clinic is located in a nondescript office park on a busy road in Palo Alto, California. It has slate-gray walls and dull burgundy furniture; the only sign of life is an underwater photograph of a clownfish peeping warily from the safety of an anemone's tentacles. The clinic is built around the idea that social skills are just like any other skill. Founders Philip Zimbardo and Lynne Hender son call their concept social-fitness training—we might call it myelination through deep practice. “We believe that people are shy not because they lack social skills but because they haven't practiced them sufficiently” said therapist Nicole Shiloff. “Talking on the phone or asking someone on a date is a learnable skill, exactly like a tennis forehand.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

Then there’s the “nose-pick factor,” a term used by researchers who install cameras inside of cars to study drivers. They report that after only a short time, drivers will “forget the camera” and begin to do all sorts of things, including nasal probing. The flip side of anonymity, as the classic situationist psychological studies of Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram have shown, is that it encourages aggression. In a well-known 1969 study, Zimbardo found that hooded subjects were willing to administer twice the level of electric shock to others than those not wearing hoods. Similarly, this is why hooded hostages are more likely to be killed than those without hoods, and why firing-squad victims are blindfolded or faced backward—not for their sake, but to make them look less human to the executioners.

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Gabler, “The Fatality and Injury Risk of Light Truck Impacts with Pedestrians in the United States,” Accident Analysis & Prevention, vol. 36 (2004), pp. 295–304. “grieving while driving”: Paul C. Rosenblatt, “Grieving While Driving,” Death Studies, vol. 28, (2004), pp. 679–86. including nasal probing: Thanks to Daniel McGehee for this story. not wearing hoods: Philip Zimbardo. “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order vs. Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos.” In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. W. J. Arnold and D. Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970). Zimbardo’s description of the conditions that contribute to the sense of “deindividuation” are worth noting in light of traffic.

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune
by Alexander Stille
Published 19 Jun 2023

“One or two guards on each shift became progressively meaner over time, others maintained a more even-tempered style, and a few were considered ‘good guards’ from the prisoners’ perspectives,” wrote Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the experiment. “However, none of the ‘good guards’ ever intervened to prevent the cruelty of their fellow guards.” That sounds quite a bit like the Sullivanian therapists—who ranged from cruel and sadistic to comparatively sympathetic—none of whom challenged the system that gave therapists such power over their patients. Bill Goldberg thinks that the Stanford Prison Experiment helps explain much about groups like the Fourth Wall. “The experiment was supposed to last two weeks and got called off after six days because the psychologist’s girlfriend intervened and said, ‘Philip, you’ve got to stop: this is really hurting people.’

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The Robbers Cave experiment (1954) pitted groups of boys into opposing camps that resulted in a kind of Lord of the Flies degree of group hostility. Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments (1963) encouraged participants to inflict pain on others—to see how far they would go in obeying authority. In the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), a psychology professor created a simulated prison in which students were asked to be either prisoners or guards, leading to disturbing levels of cruel and sadistic behavior. These experiments lasted a short time, but their meaning and value—as well as the potential harm they caused—are still widely debated.

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In the first of his experiments, two-thirds of the subjects were willing to deliver the highest level of shock. This might explain why, despite signs of obvious pain and trauma, trainees of the Sullivan Institute continued to push their patients to dump their spouses, send their children away, and cut off their families. In many ways, however, the best analogy is the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971), in which a psychology professor turned the basement of the university’s psychology department into a simulated prison and randomly assigned a group of undergraduates to the roles of guards and prisoners. The students adapted so quickly to their assigned roles that they were either inflicting or submitting to rapidly increasing levels of sadistic punishment; the experiment had to be cut short when the lead psychologist seemed to lose sight of the real pain he was causing.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives
by Tim Harford
Published 3 Oct 2016

Or was the neighborhood already in trouble when someone abandoned their property? The story that Kelling and Wilson spin tries to make cause and effect seem clear, but in reality they are hopelessly tangled. Indeed, as one looks into the evidence base for the broken windows idea, it starts to look very thin. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo is mentioned by Kelling and Wilson: He arranged to have an automobile without license plates parked with its hood up on a street in the Bronx and a comparable automobile on a street in Palo Alto, California . . . The car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer.

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle
Published 12 Mar 2019

But his “playing Mafia” and treating lawbreaking as an antidote to boredom points to a casualization of criminality within the sharing economy. In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson wrote about the broken-windows theory in The Atlantic. To illustrate their point that disorder begets disorder, they used Philip Zimbardo’s 1969 experiments with a car left in the Bronx bearing signs of deviance (hood up, no license plates) and a comparable vehicle left in Palo Alto, California, although without any signs of deviance.18 Within minutes of being “abandoned,” the vehicle in the Bronx was vandalized by a family that stole the radiator and battery.

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart
by James R. Doty, Md
Published 2 Feb 2016

—Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spiritual leader and founder of the Art of Living Foundation “I can think of no comparable book with such a brilliantly created narrative following the remarkable arc of the author’s life: From growing up as a poor, disadvantaged child into a brilliant neurosurgeon and wealthy entrepreneur, Doty’s story moves deftly, from using his scalpel to save the lives of his patients to using his compassionate heart to enrich the lives of others. Profound, deeply moving, and emotionally resonating.” —Philip Zimbardo, PhD, author of The Lucifer Effect “Into the Magic Shop will literally rewire your brain. It is a candid and personal story about a life transformed by a chance encounter in a magic shop. It is a truly optimistic and inspirational testament to the power of compassion and the ability to overcome adversity and discover your true potential.”

Cocaine Nation: How the White Trade Took Over the World
by Thomas Feiling
Published 20 Jul 2010

Howard Campbell, ‘Drug Trafficking Stories: Everyday forms of Narco-Folklore on the US-Mexico Border’, International Journal of Drug Policy, 16, 2005, p. 327. 49. ‘Clinton’s Crack Cocaine Apology’, Huffington Post. 50. Johnson, Golub and Dunlap, ‘The Rise and Decline of Hard Drugs’, in Blumstein and Wallman (eds), The Crime Drop in America, p. 184. 51. Craig Haney and Philip Zimbardo, ‘The Past and Future of US Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years after the Stanford Prison Experiment’, American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 716. 52. Marc Maurer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: New Press, 1999), p. 185. 53. Observatoire Géopolitique des Drogues, ‘The World Geopolitics of Drugs 1998/1999’ (Paris, France: OGD, April 2000), p. 133. 54.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Published 12 May 2014

The researchers concluded that surveillance encourages those who are being watched to “affirm their endorsement of prevailing social norms” as they attempt to “actively manage their reputations.” A comprehensive experiment conducted in 1975 by Stanford University psychologists Gregory White and Philip Zimbardo, entitled “The Chilling Effects of Surveillance,” sought to assess whether being watched had an impact on the expression of controversial political opinions. The impetus for the study was Americans’ concerns about surveillance by the government: The Watergate scandal, revelations of White House bugging, and Congressional investigations of domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency have served to underscore the developing paranoid theme of American life: Big Brother may be watching you!

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

The shocks were fake, but the students did not know this, and an extraordinary two-thirds of the students were prepared, when urged on by the experimenter, to deliver what appeared to be very painful and damaging doses of electricity.[cccxliv] The experiment has been replicated numerous times around the world, with similar results. Ten years later, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, a school friend of Milgram’s, ran a different experiment in which students were recruited and arbitrarily assigned the roles of prisoners and guards in a make-believe prison. He was shocked to see how enthusiastically sadistic the students who were chosen to be guards became, and he was obliged to terminate the exercise early.

You Are Not So Smart
by David McRaney
Published 20 Sep 2011

When a man believes the stripper really likes him, or when the boss thinks all his employees love to hear his stories about fishing in Costa Rica, that’s the fundamental attribution error. It’s hard to grasp just how powerful a situation can be, how much it can influence the behavior of you and people you think you know pretty well. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University that would rattle him to his core and change psychology forever. Zimbardo was interested in the roles you play throughout your life, the characters you create and then pretend to be depending on the situation. He thought perhaps the brutality displayed in war and in prisons had less to do with evil than it did with unconscious role-playing.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

is the wrong question: Evaluating ideas not programs’, chrisblattman.com, 19 July 2016. 29Jens Ludwig, Jeffrey R. Kling & Sendhil Mullainathan, ‘Mechanism experiments and policy evaluations’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 3, 2011, pp. 17–38. 30In 1969, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo tried this on a small scale, smashing the windows on a parked car and then watching to see how members of the community responded. See George Kelling & James Wilson, ‘Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety’, Atlantic, vol. 249, no. 3, 1982, pp. 29–38. 31See USAID, ‘Frequently Asked Questions about Development Innovation Ventures’, Washington, DC: USAID, 6 February 2017; USAID, ‘FY2015 & FY2016 Development Innovation Ventures Annual Program Statement’, Washington, DC: USAID, 20 October 2015. 32These examples are drawn from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy (now incorporated into the Laura and John Arnold Foundation), and a presentation by Adam Gamoran, titled ‘Measuring impact in science education: Challenges and possibilities of experimental design’, NYU Abu Dhabi Conference, January 2009. 33‘In praise of human guinea pigs’, The Economist, 12 December 2015, p. 14. 34Education Endowment Foundation, ‘Classification of the security of findings from EEF evaluations’, 21 May 2014. 35‘David Olds speaks on value of randomized controlled trials’, Children’s Health Policy Centre, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, 26 May 2014. 36Dean Karlan & Daniel H.

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
by Elaine N. Aron
Published 1 Dec 2013

Maybe that would be all right if the tests were of a state of mind, but they’re often used to identify “shy people,” who then bear a negative label. Beware of the hidden prejudice behind the word shy. Calling Yourself Shy Is Self-Fulfilling A rather charming psychological experiment involving shyness, done at Stanford University by Susan Brodt and Philip Zimbardo, demonstrates why you need to know that you are not shy but just an HSP who can become overaroused. Brodt and Zimbardo found women students who said they were extremely “shy,” especially with men, and others who were not “shy,” to serve as a comparison group. In the study, which supposedly concerned the effects of loud noise, each woman spent time with a young man.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo The neurobiology of conformity and obedience won’t soon be revealing much about the core question in this field: if the circumstances are right, is every human capable of doing something appalling simply because they’ve been ordered to, because everyone else is doing it? It is virtually required by law to discuss three of the most influential, daring, disturbing, and controversial studies in the history of psychology, namely the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, the shock/obedience studies of Stanley Milgram, and the Stanford Prison Experiment of Philip Zimbardo. The grandparent of the trio was Asch, working in the early 1950s at Swarthmore College.62 The format of his studies was simple. A volunteer, thinking that this was a study of perception, would be given a pair of cards. One card would have a line on it, the other a trio of different-length lines, one of which matched the length of the singleton line.

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And the famed result was that most volunteers complied, shocking the learner repeatedly. Teachers would typically try to stop, argue with the scientist, would even weep in distress—but would obey. In the original study, horrifically, 65 percent of them administered the maximum shock of 450 volts. — And then there’s the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), carried out by Zimbardo in 1971.64 Twenty-four young male volunteers, mostly college students, were randomly split into a group of twelve “prisoners” and twelve “guards.” The prisoners were to spend seven to fourteen days jailed in a pseudoprison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department.

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Glossary of Abbreviations ACC anterior cingulate cortex ACTH adrenocorticotropic hormone ADHD attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder AIS androgen insensitivity syndrome APA American Psychological Association ASD autism spectrum disorders BDNF brain-derived neurotrophic factor BLA basolateral amygdala BMI body mass index BNST bed nucleus of the stria terminalis CAH congenital adrenal hyperplasia CBT cognitive behavioral therapy COMT catechol-O-methyltransferase CRH corticotropin-releasing hormone DAT dopamine transporter DHEA dehydroepiandrosterone dlPFC dorsolateral PFC DZ dizygotic EEA equal environment assumption EEG electroencephalographic; EEGs electroencephalograms ERPS event-related potentials fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging FTD frontotemporal dementia GABA gamma-aminobutyric acid GnRH gonadotropin-releasing hormone GSR galvanic skin resistance GWAS genomewide association studies HG hunter-gatherer HH high-warmth/high-competence HL high warmth/low competence IAT Implicit Association Test LH low warmth/high competence LH luteinizing hormone LL low warmth/low competence LTD long-term depression LTP long-term potentiation MAO-A monoamine oxidase-A MHC major histocompatibility complex MZ monozygotic NCAM neural cell adhesion molecule PAG periaqueductal gray PD Prisoner’s Dilemma PFC prefrontal cortex PMC premotor cortex PMDD premenstrual dysphoric disorder PMS premenstrual syndrome PNS parasympathetic nervous system PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder PVN paraventricular nucleus RNA ribonucleic acid RWA right-wing authoritarianism SDO social-dominance orientation SES socioeconomic status SHRP stress hyporesponsive period SNPs single-nucleotide polymorphisms SNS sympathetic nervous system SPE Stanford Prison Experiment SSRI selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor STG superior temporal gyrus TF transcription factor TH tryptophan hydroxylase ToM Theory of Mind TPJ temporoparietal juncture TRC truth and reconciliation commission vlPFC ventrolateral prefrontal cortex vmPFC ventromedial PFC 54 Abbreviations in the Notes In order to save forests’ worth of paper, references cite only the first one or two authors.

Against Everything: Essays
by Mark Greif
Published 5 Sep 2016

Since the establishment of informed-consent rules in the 1970s, the golden age of social psychology is gone. No more Stanley Milgram’s proof that ordinary citizens will push the voltage to the red zone while the electrocuted actor screams—so long as a lab-coated tester is there to give the orders. No more Philip Zimbardo’s proof that fake guards will brutalize fake prisoners if you arbitrarily split Stanford students into two groups, lock them in a basement, and leave them to their own devices. No more Harold Garfinkel’s demonstrations that testers can drive strangers berserk if they stare at other riders on the elevator or if children refuse to recognize their parents.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

He did not get tenure at Harvard, partially because of the controversy related to the ethical issues of his experiments, and settled permanently back in New York at City University (CUNY). Milgram grew up in modest circumstances in New York City, the son of immigrant Jewish bakers whom I would have enjoyed meeting given my chronic addiction to good bread. He was a high school friend of another eminent social psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, who became famous for his “prison experiments” at Stanford in the early 1970s. These were inspired by Milgram’s obedience to authority research and demonstrated how otherwise normal people (Stanford students in this case) can be induced to perform sadistic acts when playing the role of a prison guard or to exhibit extreme passivity and depression when playing the role of a prisoner.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

Recall that Jonathan Glover showed that atrocities are often accompanied by tactics of dehumanization such as the use of pejorative names, degrading conditions, humiliating dress, and “cold jokes” that make light of suffering.57 These tactics can flip a mental switch and reclassify an individual from “person” to “nonperson,” making it as easy for someone to torture or kill him as it is for us to boil a lobster alive. (Those who poke fun at politically correct names for ethnic minorities, including me, should keep in mind that they originally had a humane rationale.) The social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has shown that even among the students of an elite university, tactics of dehumanization can easily push one person outside another’s moral circle. Zimbardo created a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department and randomly assigned students to the role of prisoner or guard.

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R., & Kagan, J. 1996. Perception of music by infants. Nature, 383, 29. Zhou, R., & Black, I. B. 2000. Development of neural maps: Molecular mechanisms. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.),The new cognitive neurosciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. 2000. Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis, transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.),Current perspectives on the Milgram paradigm. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. Zimler, J., & Keenan, J. M. 1983. Imagery in the congenitally blind: How visual are visual images? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 9, 269–282.

I Can't Breathe
by Matt Taibbi
Published 23 Oct 2017

— Sometime later, a Harvard professor named James Wilson called Kelling and told him he wanted to write an article with him for the Atlantic magazine. Wilson was already known as an original—if sometimes controversial—thinker on criminal justice issues. Kelling accepted. For their Atlantic article, Wilson wanted to incorporate the ideas of famed Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo had performed an experiment involving disabled vehicles in two locations, a rough section of the Bronx and an upscale section of Palo Alto. In both places the car had its license plate removed and was left with its hood up. In the Bronx the car was skeletonized by locals almost immediately, with the radio and battery ripped out right away.

Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
by Laszlo Bock
Published 31 Mar 2015

The moving video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97bZu-tXLq4. 96. John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887, in Historical Essays and Studies, eds. John Neville Figgis and Reginald Vere Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907), 504. 97. Discovering Psychology with Philip Zimbardo, PhD, updated edition, “Power of the Situation,” reference starts at 10 minutes 59 seconds into video, http://www.learner.org/series/discoveringpsychology/19/e19expand.html. 98. There has been extensive research exploring, expanding on, and criticizing Milgram’s findings. For example, see works by Alex Haslam (University of Queensland) and Stephen Reicher (University of St.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
by Brigid Schulte
Published 11 Mar 2014

Joan Williams, “Women Don’t Negotiate Because They’re Not Idiots,” Huffington Post, January 31, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-williams/women-dont-negotiate_b_2593106.html. 6. Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy,” in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, vol. 4, ed. V. S. Ramachaudran (New York: Academic Press, 1994), 71–81, www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Bandura/BanEncy.html. 7. Philip Zimbardo, “Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory,” The Time Paradox website, www.thetimeparadox.com/zimbardo-time-perspective-inventory/. 8. “The Energy Audit,” The Energy Project website, http://theenergyproject.com/tools/the-energy-audit. 9. I use part of the Pomodoro Technique to help my kids get caught up with their homework if they fall behind.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

Group animosity: Hoyle, Pinkley, & Insko, 1989; see also Baumeister, 1997, 193–94. 266. Obedience experiments: Milgram, 1974. 267. Fact and fiction about Kitty Genovese: Manning, Levine, & Collins, 2007. Bystander apathy: Latané & Darley, 1970. 268. Stanford Prison Experiment: Zimbardo, 2007; Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney, 2000. 269. No Germans punished for disobedience: Goldhagen, 2009. 270. Milgram replication: Burger, 2009. See Reicher & Haslam, 2006, for a partial replication of the Stanford Prison Experiment, but with too many differences to allow a test of trends over time. 271. Obedience might be even lower: Twenge, 2009. 272. Advantages of conformity: Deutsch & Gerard, 1955. 273.

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People don’t even need to witness other people behaving callously to behave in uncharacteristically callous ways. It is enough to place them in a fictive group that is defined as being dominant over another one. In another classic psychology-experiment-cum-morality-play (conducted in 1971, before committees for the protection of human subjects put the kibosh on the genre), Philip Zimbardo set up a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, divided the participants at random into “prisoners” and “guards,” and even got the Palo Alto police to arrest the prisoners and haul them to the campus hoosegow.268 Acting as the prison superintendent, Zimbardo suggested to the guards that they could flaunt their power and instill fear in the prisoners, and he reinforced the atmosphere of group dominance by outfitting the guards with uniforms, batons, and mirrored sunglasses while dressing the prisoners in humiliating smocks and stocking caps.

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One component of the human moral sense, amplified in many cultures, is the elevation of conformity and obedience to praiseworthy virtues. Milgram ran his experiments in the 1960s and early 1970s, and as we have seen, many attitudes have changed since then. It’s natural to wonder whether Westerners today would still obey the instructions of an authority figure to brutalize a stranger. The Stanford Prison Experiment is too bizarre to replicate exactly today, but thirty-three years after the last of the obedience studies, the social psychologist Jerry Burger figured out a way to carry out a new one that would pass ethical muster in the world of 2008.270 He noticed that in Milgram’s original studies, the 150-volt mark, when the victim first cries out in pain and protest, was a point of no return.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

And so I guess, if I could go back in time and prevent my birth, I wouldn’t do it. But I sure wish I hadn’t had so much pain.” The pain came in part from loneliness, which was once a common complaint among the tiny and obsessive cadre of computer fans. (A 1980 commentary by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo implied that hackers were antisocial losers who turned to computers to avoid human contact.) But as hacker culture spread, so did its social acceptability. Today, computer geeks are seen not as losers, but as moguls in the making. They tend not to suffer the intense isolation that has plagued Stallman—thanks, ironically enough, to the commercialization that he so bemoans.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Subjects of a government satisfy the conditions for the development of Stockholm Syndrome and also show some of its symptoms. 6.7 Case studies in the abuse of power 6.7.1 My Lai revisited In the My Lai massacre, soldiers were just following orders. One soldier who helped the villagers was reviled as a traitor. 6.7.2 The Stanford Prison Experiment Volunteers participated in a simulation of prison life. The guards became increasingly abusive toward the prisoners. 6.7.3 Lessons of the SPE Power leads people to inflict pain and humiliation on others. Those who are not corrupted do little to restrain those who are. 6.8 Conclusion: anatomy of an illusion The common belief in authority is the product of nonrational biases.

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Sometimes the authorities must succeed in hiding their misdeeds. How often, we do not know. Thompson reports that, after his experience at My Lai, other soldiers told him, ‘Oh, that stuff happened all the time.’51 There is thus reason to suspect that many more massacres occurred that did not make the news. 6.7.2 The Stanford Prison Experiment In 1971, social psychologist Phillip Zimbardo conducted an illuminating study of the effects of imprisonment on both guards and prisoners.52 Zimbardo collected 21 volunteers, all male college students, to play the role of either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison. At the start, all the volunteers wanted to play the prisoner role; none wanted to be guards.

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One might have suspected that prisoner abuse occurs because prisoners are believed to be criminals or enemies, so that the abuse is thought justified. Or one might have thought that prisoner abuse occurs because individuals with sadistic predispositions are more likely to become guards or because prison inmates tend to be unusually aggressive and thus draw out aggressive responses on the part of guards. The Stanford Prison Experiment is of particular interest in that it puts hypotheses like these to the test. As it turns out, none of these things was the case. There was something about the guard role that brought out the worst in people. Zimbardo’s central conclusion, from this study and much other evidence, is that the determinants of good or evil behavior lie more in the situations that individuals are placed into than in those individuals’ intrinsic dispositions.53 An individual’s circumstances can have dramatic corrupting or uplifting effects.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
by Barry Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 2004

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author. Praise for The Paradox of Choice “The Paradox of Choice has a simple yet profoundly life-altering message for all Americans. Schwartz’s eleven practical, simple steps to becoming less choosey will change much in your daily life…. Buy This Book Now!” —PHILIP G. ZIMBARDO, author of Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It “In this revolutionary and beautifully reasoned book, Barry Schwartz shows that there is vastly too much choice in the modern world. This promiscuous amount of choice renders the consumer helpless and dissatisfied. The Paradox of Choice is a must read for every thoughtful person.”

I You We Them
by Dan Gretton

But if the volunteers had been told at the outset that the shocks weren’t real, or that the ‘learner’ in the other room was only an actor who was part of the experiment, the research would have had no value at all. This for me has always been the glaring weakness at the heart of Philip Zimbardo’s ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ in 1971, when college student volunteers were allocated ‘roles’ as ‘prisoners’ or ‘prison guards’. All participants were essentially involved in a piece of role-play from the outset, everyone knowing that the conditions were only simulated, and far from real world. However disturbing some of the subsequent behaviour was, there was never an underpinning of reality to the research, as there was with Milgram’s experiments.

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After being found guilty of fraud and criminal complicity in the auditing of the American energy corporation Enron in 2001, Arthur Andersen was wound up – though its consultancy arm, which split from the main company in 2000, continues to operate as Accenture. 2 As I revised this chapter, the new Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini, promised to turn ‘words into action’ and begin the process of expelling thousands of Roma from Italy: ‘Far-right Italy minister vows “action” to expel thousands of Roma’, Guardian, 19 June 2018. 3 The Nigerian government had alleged that four people, not five, as David states here, were killed by associates of Saro-Wiwa (this allegation was never supported with any factual evidence). 4 Figures from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. 5 Report on Civilian Harm and Conflict in Northwest Pakistan by American NGO CIVIC, October 2010. 6 See ‘Judging the Desk Killers’ in Book One, Chapter Thirteen 7 See chapter notes for further reflections on the ethics of Milgram’s experiment and Zimbardo’s ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’. 8 This example is taken from Albert Bandura’s invaluable paper ‘Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities’ in Personality and Social Psychology Review (1999). 14 The Oilman and the Broken Wing 1 World in Action, Granada TV, 13 May 1996. 15 A Painting in The Hague; A Farmhouse in Suffolk; A Stadium in Somalia 1 This term ‘sacrifice zones’ was originally coined in the Soviet Union to denote areas that would be sacrificed in the case of a nuclear war, but more recently it has been used by American environmental writers Steve Lerner and Chris Hedges to describe exploited and environmentally degraded industrial zones. 2 ‘The records of no small town in England, we suppose, have been treated with more patient and scholarly care than Mr Gretton has shown in this book.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

The overall average among all conditions was about 72 percent. (See Beauvois, Courbet, and Oberlé, “Prescriptive Power.”) 9 Eleanor Beardsley, “Fake TV Game Show ‘Tortures’ Man, Shocks France,” NPR, March 18, 2010, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124838091. 10 See also Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (London: Rider, 2007). 11 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (East Rutherford, NJ: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006): 276. 12 Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson, “Power, Approach, and Inhibition,” Psychological Review 110, no. 2 (2003): 265–84; Deborah H.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

“It is remarkable how much attention”: Henderson, “Media and the Rise of Celebrity Culture.” 47. wandered lonely as a cloud: William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 1802. 48. repaired in solitude to Walden Pond: Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854. 49. Americans who considered themselves shy: Bernardo Carducci and Philip G. Zimbardo, “Are You Shy?” Psychology Today, November 1, 1995. 50. “Social anxiety disorder” … one in five of us: M. B. Stein, J. R. Walker, and D. R. Forde, “Setting Diagnostic Thresholds for Social Phobia: Considerations from a Community Survey of Social Anxiety,” American Journal of Psychiatry 151 (1994): 408–42. 51.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

Richard Barrett Ulman and D. Wilfred Abse, “The Group Psychology of Mass Madness: Jonestown,” Political Psychology 4, no. 4 (1983): 637–61, doi:10.2307/3791059. 37. Eileen Barker, “Religious Movements: Cult and Anticult Since Jonestown,” Annual Review of Sociology 12 (1986): 329–46. 38. Philip G. Zimbardo and Cynthia F. Hartley, “Cults Go to High School: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Initial Stage in the Recruitment Process,” Cultic Studies Journal 2 (1985): 91–147, www.purl.stanford.edu/vv317cb6196. 39. Kevin Corinth and David S. Lucas, “When Warm and Cold Don’t Mix: The Implications of Climate for the Determinants of Homelessness,” Journal of Housing Economics 41 (September 2018): 45–56, doi:10.1016/j.jhe.2018.01.001. 40.

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life
by Gretchen Rubin
Published 3 Sep 2012

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

the more severe the consequences: Cuiming Pang (2008), “Self-censorship and the rise of cyber collectives: An anthropological study of a Chinese online community,” Intercultural Communication Studies 18, http://www.uri.edu/iaics/content/2008v17n3/05%20Cuiming%20Pang.pdf. Surveillance has a: Gregory L. White and Philip G. Zimbardo (May 1975), “The chilling effects of surveillance: Deindividuation and reactance,” Office of Naval Research/National Technical Information Service, http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a013230.pdf. The net result is that GPS: US Supreme Court (23 Jan 2012), “Decision,” United States v. Jones (No. 10-1259), http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling
by Arlie Russell Hochschild
Published 1 Nov 1983

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

Eyring has written, “My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve: the best place to look is for small changes we could make in the things we do often. There is power in steadiness and repetition.”6 When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons).

…

In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too?

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Sigmund Krancberg, A Soviet Postmortem: Philosophical Roots of the “Grand Failure” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994), 56. 3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/poiesi 17. PROGRESS 1. Parts of this chapter were first published in a blog post I wrote for Harvard Business Review called “Can We Reverse The Stanford Prison Experiment?” June 12, 2012. 2. Based on my interviews with Ward Clapham between 2011 and 2013. 3. Speech at the annual Labour Party Conference, September 30, 1993, when Blair was shadow home secretary; see “Not a Time for Soundbites: Tony Blair in Quotations,” Oxford University Press Blog, June 29, 2007, http://blog.oup.com/2007/06/tony_blair/#sthash.P1rI6OHy.dpuf. 4.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Some had even fantasized, as I had during my time in start-up land, that their companies weren’t companies at all, but rather were part of some long-term psychology experiment, a corporate version of the Milgram experiment at Yale or the Stanford prison experiment. The 1961 Milgram experiment studied obedience to authority figures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered subjects to keep administering ever-stronger shocks to a “learner” on the other side of a wall, and many kept going, even when the learner shrieked, pleaded, and banged on the wall. In the 1971 Stanford prison experiment, twenty-four college students were put into a mock prison, with half role-playing as guards and half role-playing as prisoners, to see what happens when people are given power over others.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by Jaron Lanier
Published 28 May 2018

We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal. The power of what other people think has proven to be intense enough to modify the behavior of subjects participating in famous studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal, noncriminal people were coerced into doing horrible things, such as torturing others, through no mechanism other than social pressure. On social networks, the manipulation of social emotions has been the easiest way to generate rewards and punishments. That might change someday, if drones start dropping actual candy from the sky when you do what the algorithm wants, but for now it’s all about feelings that can be evoked in you—mostly, feelings regarding what other people think.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

Fortunately Daniel Kahneman, the academic most associated with examining bias in human decision-making, did. Through decades of empirical research with long-time collaborator Amos Tversky, he pioneered the study of how we take decisions – and especially irrational ones. I won’t recite the Stanford Prison Experiments or the Ultimatum Game, but Kahneman’s main point was that there are two basic systems that govern human behaviour. ‘System one’ thinking is fast, instinctive and emotional. It’s the reptilian brain, running on instinct. By contrast, ‘system two’ thinking is slow, deliberative and more logical.7 It sometimes, but not always, acts as a check on those wilder rages.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

When humans have incomplete knowledge, their instinct is to follow the group. Many people in the Asch experiment did not follow the group, but the experiment involved an easy question with an obvious answer. Everyone should have answered correctly yet almost 37% of people did not. Google “Stanford Prison Experiments” for another example of the astonishing levels of conformity observed in experimental settings. In markets, where incomplete information and group behavior are an intrinsic part of the game, you need to make sure you are always thinking for yourself. Don’t get caught up in the CNBC (bullish) or Twitter (bearish) hype or get sucked in by what the “smart guy at the big hedge fund” wrote in his opinion piece in the FT.

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Covey), 95, 491 Seykota, Ed, 388 Sharpe, Steven A., 228—229 Sharpe ratio, 114, 139, 150, 160, 161, 162, 396 Shiller, Robert J., 247, 491 signals, 156, 234, 239, 317, 334, 336, 346, 392, 415 bearish, 218 breakout, 161 bullish, 336, 337, 338 cross-market, 261 for FX traders, 315 high volumes, 329 overbought and oversold, 340, 341, 443 price action, 161, 162 private, 185 public, 185 reversal, 341, 443 reversion, 443 See also doji; hammers significant reference points (SRPs), 325—331 NewsPivots, 305, 325-327, 330, 368, 408, 431 support and resistance, 327—331 silver, 425 skeptic, healthy, 103, 259 skepticism, healthy trader and financial press, 242 as trader attribute, 103—104 versus cynicism, 259 skew, 341 skill, trader success and, 23, 42, 58, 72, 75, 349, 351—352, 363, 380—381, 434 analytical, 69 estimating probability, 79, 211 filtering, 302, 306 focus, 136 quantitative, 104 risk management, 349 slippage, 40, 155 Snowberg, Erik, 209 sophomore jinx, 204 Soros, George, 87, 301 Soto, Christopher, 48 Spearman’s positive manifold, 63 sports. See success, sport Sports Illustrated jinx, 204 spreads, 276—278 squirrel-chasing bias. See chasing bias Stanford Prison Experiments, 83 Stanovich, Keith, 62—63 stealing thunder technique, 202 stimulation, trading for, 157, 188 See also overtrading; sensation-seeking traders stochastics, 338, 341 stock indexes, 477 stock market, Canadian, 473 stock market, U.S., 42, 163, 222, 253, 260, 263, 278, 290 bullish retail hysteria in, 427 COVID-19 and, 331, 425 crash predictions, 264—265 sentiment surveys and indicators, 345 statistics, 265 VIX and, 427 See also bubbles; Flash Crash of 2010; NASDAQ; Reminiscences of a Stock Operator; S&P 500 stocks, 260-265 bad economic news and, 263—264 gold and, 262—263 total return of bonds and (Jan to Oct 2020), 261 up more than down, 265 versus bonds, 260—261 See also NASDAQ; S&P 500 StockTwits, 267 stop losses, 227 automated, 105—106, 134, 157, 392 determining, 392, 413, 414 discipline, 57 on the downside, 119 trade executions and, 422—423 trigger, 195 See also stop losses, daily stop losses, daily, 116 day traders and, 367, 368 junior institutional traders and, 368 retail traders and, 368 strategy, trading, 323, 331, 413 evaluating, 101 See also specific trading strategies stress management ability, 34, 72, 481 as trader attribute, 75, 104, 131—135 stress testing, 118 Strowger, Vanessa, 69 success, 43—49, 51—54, 58, 71 avoidance of negative outcomes and, 43 birth month and, 53, 54 educational achievement and, 43, 51, 52, 58 effort and, 52 environment and, 52 formula for, 58 happiness and, 43 health and, 43 income and, 43 IQ and, 44—46 longevity and, 43 luck and, 52—53, 58, 71 personality and, 46—49 skill and, 52, 58, 71 talent and, 52, 58, 71 See also conscientiousness; success, financial; success, sport; success, trading success, financial, 49—53 Big Five Personality Traits and, 49—51, 52 birth month and, 53 success, sport, 43, 51, 52, 58 birth month and, 53, 54 success, trading, 37, 469 bank traders, 40 day traders, 41—42 environment and, 52 financial literacy and, 71 hedge fund traders, 40 high intelligence and, 71, 72 luck and, 54, 55 numeracy and, 71 professional investors, 42 rationality and, 61, 62, 66—72 rate, 40—42 recipe for, 142, 494 research, 66—71 self-control and, 71 See also alpha trader; trader attributes, positive cognitive; trader attributes, positive miscellaneous; trader attributes, positive non- cognitive Success Equation, The (M.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
by Dan Lyons
Published 4 Apr 2016

I try to distance myself from the abuse. I pretend I’m an anthropologist. How does the tribe behave when the chief has decided that one of the members must be driven off? I imagine that I’m a research psychologist and that the HubSpot marketing department is a laboratory exercise, a corporate version of the Stanford prison experiment or the Milgram experiment at Yale. I imagine that I am studying the way a corporate department goes about getting rid of an unwanted employee, using myself as the subject of the experiment. I’ve heard horror stories about people who have gone through this, but I’ve never experienced it myself, and I don’t know how it is done, specifically.

More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea
by Tom Reynolds
Published 30 Apr 2009

I’m guessing that a lot of you are aware of the Milgram experiment, where members of the public more willingly follow instructions if the giver is wearing a uniform or other symbol of authority. (Go to the internet for a more complete explanation. If you’ve never heard of this experiment, it and the Stanford prison experiment make scary reading.) So when I am wearing my uniform I am more confident and can order people around. The police, firefighters and members of the public tend to do what I tell them if there is someone sick around. Obviously I only use these powers for the force of good, but without my uniform I am a much shyer person.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou
Published 13 Apr 2015

Parallel Kingdom Website: parallelkingdom.com↩ “The Crying Indian,” from Keep America Beautiful by Advertising Council: http://www.yukaichou.com/KeepAmericaBeautiful↩ Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, and Robert Cialdini. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. P20. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. 2010.↩ Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin, and Robert Cialdini. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive. P22. Simon & Schuster. New York, NY. 2010.↩ The famous Stanford Prison Experiment suggests that anyone could potentially behave like a Nazi in given circumstances:http://www.yukaichou.com/StanfordPrison↩ The mass suicide project known as Jonestown: http://www.yukaichou.com/Jonestown↩ Patricia Cross. New Directions for Higher Education. 17: 1–15. “Not can but will college teachers be improved?”.

Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress--And How to Bring It Back
by Marc J Dunkelman
Published 17 Feb 2025

The case for popular cynicism only seemed to grow stronger and more pervasive. It wasn’t just Vietnam and Watergate. A prison rebellion at Attica, in upstate New York. A full recitation of the atrocities in My Lai. The Manson Family’s cultish rampage through Southern California. The infamous Stanford prison experiment, where students pretending to be guards began to abuse students pretending to be inmates.113 When Rolling Stone published Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, gonzo journalism’s almost dystopian quality read to some as an indictment of the drug-riddled counterculture of the 1960s.

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference
by David Halpern
Published 26 Aug 2015

More than two-thirds of subjects did continue (in Milgram’s typical experiment) even though, as far as they could tell, the now silent subject had either passed out or died. 10 Milgram’s work itself built on earlier studies by Solomon Asch showing that most subjects would choose an obviously wrong answer if those before them also chose it. These early results were followed by scores more studies, all showing the power of the situation to shape human behaviour. These ranged from Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Cell experiment where college kids seemed to turn into sadists or compliant prisoners depending on the role they were (randomly) assigned, to Latané and Darley’s studies showing that groups of subjects would sit unmoving in rooms filling with smoke, or fail to help a fallen assistant in the next room, while subjects sitting by themselves would intervene. 11 These experiments, in the wake of the atrocities of the Second World War, shocked the world (and America in particular).

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica
by Nicholas Johnson
Published 31 May 2005

The participants were randomly divided into “guards” and “prisoners.” The psychologists told the guards only to “maintain law and order,” not to hit the prisoners with their billy clubs, and that if any prisoner escaped from the “prison” (the basement of the Stanford University psychology department—with offices converted into prison cells) then the experiment would be terminated. Other than that they were left to their own devices. The guards decided that the prisoners should refer to the guards as “Mr. Correctional Officer,” while the prisoners were referred to by their numbers. On the second day, some of the prisoners ripped the numbers off their smocks and made fun of the guards.