Link to the Show / Show NotesDr. John Riolo, host of The Insider, interviews Dr. Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil published by Random House.
Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the 'voice and face of contemporary American psychology' through his widely seen PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment, and authoring the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, in its 18th Edition. Past president of APA, and the Western Psychological Association, Zimbardo has received numerous awards for his research, teaching, and writing.
Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor), having taught previously at Yale, NYU, and Columbia University. He has been given numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, writer, and service to the profession. Recently, he was awarded the Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition. Among his more than 300 professional publications and 50 books is the. His current research interests continue in the domain of social psychology, with a broad spread of interests from shyness to time perspective, madness, cults, vandalism, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil.
Zimbardo has served also as the Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations (with 1.5 million members), and now is Chair of the Western Psychological Foundation. He heads a philanthropic foundation in his name to promote student education in his ancestral Sicilian towns. Zimbardo adds to his retirement list activities: serving as the new executive director of a Stanford center on terrorism -- the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism (CIPERT). He was an expert witness for one of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib Prison abuses, and has studied the interrogation procedures used by the military in that and other prisons as well as by Greek and Brazilian police torturers.
Noted for his personal and professional efforts to actually 'give psychology away to the public', Zimbardo has also been a social-political activist, challenging the U.S. Government's wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the American Correctional System. Visit his websites Philip Zimbardo.com and The Lucifer Effect.org