Philip Zambardo - Research Paper Example

He has written many useful psychology books and text books for students. The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox are his famous books. He is currently heading a movement for everyday heroism and working as the director of The Heroic Imagination Project. In his book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo explains how good people lead to engage in evil actions. He has formulated his theories after 30 years of research and his theories and arguments about how good people become bad people were hotly debated topics in America at present.

There are many incidents in which people with good backgrounds turned to criminals. Zimbardo’s theories give us insights about the reasons for such transformations. He has conducted a prison study (Stanford prison study), in which he tried to study the behavior of innocent people when they face jail terms. This study has relevance now, especially because of the events such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq. I decided to research about Philip George Zimbardo mainly because of that. This paper analyses the life and contributions of Philip George Zimbardo.

Philip George Zimbardo was born on March 23, 1933 in New York City in a family of Sicilian immigrants. He has completed his BA from Brooklyn College in 1954, with psychology, sociology, and anthropology as the major subjects. He has completed his M.S. degree in 1955 and achieved a PhD in psychology from Yale University in 1959. Initially he worked in various universities as a professor. New York University, Columbia University, Stanford University and Yale are some of the institutions in which he worked as a professor in psychology.

While he was working in Stanford University, he has conducted prison study in 1971 which is famous as Stanford prison study now. He has selected some college students and assigned them roles of "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. He was forced to stop his studies after six days even though he planned the study for two weeks because of the emotional problems faced by the students. Even though the student volunteers knew that they were being used in a study and all the actions performed in this study are only mock actions, it was difficult for them to keep their emotions intact because of the terrible settings created by Zimbardo.

On arrival, the “prisoners” or the student volunteers were stripped, searched, shaved and deloused which caused a great deal of humiliation in the designed Stanford prison. Zimbardo succeeded in creating a real jail like environment and it was too difficult for the participants to adjust with it for longer period. “The test got so out of hand that it was broken off after only 6 days. Since then, Zimbardo has never spoken about the experiment, until the arrival of his book entitled ’The Lucifer Effect’” (Zimbardo breaks his silence).

The “Lucifer Effect” describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. It represents a transformation of human character that is significant in its consequences. Such transformations are more likely to occur in novel settings, in “total situations,” where social situational forces are sufficiently powerful to overwhelm, or set aside temporally, personal attributes of morality, compassion, or sense of justice and fair play