Philip G. Zimbardo (1933-2024).

Abstract

This article memorializes Philip G. Zimbardo (1933-2024). Voted "most popular" in his high school graduating class, Zimbardo went on to Brooklyn College, where he triple-majored in sociology, anthropology, and psychology, graduating in 1954. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, studying under Neal Miller and Carl Hovland, and completing his PhD in 1959. He began his career at New York University, where he taught from 1960 to 1967, often teaching 10 courses a year. In 1967, he taught for a year at Columbia, where his future colleague, Lee Ross, was among his students. He moved to Stanford in 1968 and remained on the faculty there for over 50 years. Zimbardo's research covered a myriad of topics, from early work on attitude change, dissonance, and deindividuation, to foundational work on shyness, discontinuity, and time perspective, to his last 2 decades of work on heroism. Google Scholar currently records over 72,000 citations to his work; the highest citations go to his research on time perspective and to his award-winning book, The Lucifer Effect (2007). His longtime interest in good and evil, and what leads people to act in either antisocial or prosocial ways, was first addressed in his research on deindividuation and situational factors like anonymity and social roles of differential power. This led to the Stanford Prison Experiment, a simulation study in which participants were randomly assigned to play the roles of either guards or prisoners over several days. Although perhaps best known for that study, it was not the work Zimbardo was most proud of, arguing in one interview that his more important research was his work on shyness and the establishment of the Stanford Shyness Clinic. Later work on time perspective, in which people experience different temporal orientations to past, present, and future, included the development of an individual difference measure, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, which has been translated widely for international use. More recently, Zimbardo shifted his focus from evil to good, both in terms of research on heroic behaviors and on the application of psychological principles to promote widespread actions of everyday kindness and heroism. He established a nonprofit organization, the Heroic Imagination Project, which then established Heroic Imagination Project centers in other countries. Philip Zimbardo was a warm, welcoming, and witty psychologist and a profound student of human nature. He wanted nothing more than to share his understanding and love of psychology with others to help improve individual lives as well as the wider world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).