Phil Zimbardo: Social Psychologist and Professor

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Hello, this is Guy Kawasaki. Welcome to Remarkable People. In this episode, I'm interviewing Dr. Phil Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Stanford University. Zimbardo and I go back a long way, to the mid-70s when I took psychology one from him. This was one of the best classes at Stanford. Zimbardo was a dynamic speaker and he addressed a broad range of social psychology phenomena. Zimbardo, of course, is perhaps most well known for the Stanford Prison Experiment. This is the short lived simulation where he and his graduate students turn the basement of the psychology department into a mock prison.

Prisoner 819 did a bad thing.

Do you know what made him end the experiment early? Keep listening and you'll find out. Zimbardo has retired from teaching at Stanford, but is still applying psychology to improve people's lives. In 2012, the American Psychological association awarded him the gold medal for lifetime achievement. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable people. And now here's Dr. Phil Zimbardo.

My background is I was born in New York City 86 years ago in the Bronx, New York on March 23, 1933. So my family were Sicilian immigrants on my grandmother and grandfather's side. So I am 100% Sicilian. I grew up in poverty. My parents were uneducated. They literally did not even go to high school. So I was the first person in my family to go to college and then graduate and graduate from Yale. In my whole education, from kindergarten through graduate school, I didn't pay a single penny of tuition, which current parents would go crazy because now first grade is like 10 or $20,000 in a private school. But it was clear to me that education was the key to success. That is the only way I could get out of poverty. And the only way to get out of poverty is you become a famous athlete. But that's maybe a half of a percent of all the people in the world or you become educated. And so I thought it's going to be easier. I love sports And I was good at baseball, softball and basketball and track. I was actually a track star, which is a problem now because I could hardly walk. I have bad knees. I was a captain of the track team at Brooklyn College. And I ran the quarter mile and anchored the relay, which made me happy in those days. I became a psychologist because I was really curious about race relations. Growing up in the Bronx in the mid-40s, after the Second World War, black soldiers were coming back to the south and they didn't want to live in a place that still had prejudice. So they came north. Some of them went to Harlem in Manhattan, and some of them came to the South Bronx where I lived. Now, at the same time in Puerto Rico there was a sugar crop failure and the governor of Puerto Rico gave everyone who wanted a one way ticket to United States. And again, some of them went to Harlem and some of them came to Spanish to the South Bronx. And what happened was here were these immigrants coming together in limited housing, limited work situation, and then competing, competing, unfortunately for the lowest level job. And then at the same time, early on in the 40s, heroin hit the Bronx. It was the start of drugs. And now if you're having drugs, the gangs that used to be friendly, athletic gangs now had guns to protect their turf. And it became really dangerous. So I studied the dynamics of prejudice and assimilation between blacks and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx. And it was my first publication in 1963 as an undergraduate. And that started me on a journey of publishing.

Everybody wants to talk about the prison experiment, so let's just get that over with.

Okay, yeah.

What was the hypothesis there?

Oh, the Stanford prison study was really a demonstration. It was not a traditional experiment. So let's put that up front. So in a traditional psychology experiment, you have a hypothesis about what you think would be the relationship between two or more variables. The prison study was really an exploration of what happens when you put good people in a bad place. And essentially it really grew out of my experience in the South Bronx where I and other kids were good kids and we were surrounded by evil. I mean, guys trying to get us to carry drugs from one corner to another corner for money and to do bad things. So the prison study was simply a demonstration of what happens when you put good people. And these were college students from all over the United States who had just finished summer school at Berkeley and Stanford in mid August 1971. What happens when you put them in a prison like environment? So we try to physically create, simulate a prison in the basement of Jordan hall, which is the psychology department, meaning we took the doors off offices and we put new doors with cell doors with prison bars. And the good thing about it having been in the basement was there were no clocks, there were no windows, so you couldn't tell the time of day or night. And there was only one way in or out of the basin. So it was easy to minimize prisoners trying to escape. So we began by simply putting an ad in the Palo Alto Times. Wanted college students for a study of prison life will go from one to two weeks. And the reason they did it was that they got 15 bucks a day. In 1971. That was pretty good. But see, but it also meant 1970s, all colleges began after Labor Day. We knew they all had two weeks free from the ending of summer school at UC California, Berkeley or Stanford, and before they started school. So we put the ad in the paper. 75 people answered it. We interviewed them, we gave them personality tests, and we picked two dozen who were the most normal, most psychologically and physically healthy at that time. And then we randomly assigned them. So that that's what makes it, in quote, an experiment that is, you know, almost like a flip of the coin. One is a guard, one is a prisoner. And so there were 12 guards and 12 prisoners to begin with, because of the limitations of a space, there were three prisoners in each of three cells. That means there were nine prisoners. And then we had three guards on each of three eight hour shifts, morning, afternoon and evening shifts. And then we had backup guards and backup prisoners in case they needed to fill in the role. What made this study powerful from day one, which was Sunday, August 14, 1971, is I had arranged with the chief of police, Captain Zircher, to release one squad car with two police officers Sunday morning when Palo Alto is sleeping or in church, to make mock arrest of the kids who are playing, who are going to. Who are about to play prisoners. And that created a great dynamic. And also we filmed it. I later did a video documentary called Quiet Rage, the Stanford Prison Experiment. And what we did the day before, we had the boys who were playing the role of guards come down and we went to the Army Navy store. They picked out their uniforms. So we wanted them to be military like uniforms and symbols of power. Billy clubs, whistles, handcuffs. And then the idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman was silver reflecting sunglasses. That was the theme in that movie. So nobody could see your eyes. So essentially it was dehumanizing. So all the guards and me and my staff and I had two graduate students Craig Haney and Kurt Banks, and one undergraduate who had been in my class, David Chaffee. So whenever we're in contact with the prisoners, we all had to wear those sunglasses. The police arrested them at their home or in places we had told them to wait. And they simply said, you wanted for violation a Penal Code 459pc, armed robbery or breaking and entering. And they read them the Miranda rights. They put them in a squad car with sirens wailing and brought them to the jail, the Palo Alto jail, fingerprinted them, booked them, and actually put them in a jail cell, blindfolded them. And then my graduate students came, took them, brought them to our jail, and then stripped them naked and then took the blindfold off. And now they were ready to be in prison. Were they expecting the mark RF not at all, no. No. There was a total surprise. And now, the reason the police agreed to do it was shortly before, in the spring of 71, Stanford students, like students everywhere, were protesting the Vietnam War, which was going on endlessly, endlessly. And in some cases at Stanford, the protests became violent. They were breaking library windows. There was actually a Stanford professor and several others who actually were found to have explosives in their home. The president at that time, he was a new president, called the police onto the campus. So there were physical confrontations between the police and the students that got fairly violent. The chief of police at that time got replaced with this Captain Zircha. He was new, and the president of the university, who was just there one year, Rice, was asked to step down. I guess maybe he was in chemistry or something, so he just became a professor. So I used the occasion to psychologically diffuse the tension between town and gown. That is, I invited policemen to come and have dinner in the dorms. I had been a faculty resident in Cedro, and then also I had arranged to have students ride around in police cars. And having done that, the new captain was very pleased and invited me to meet with him and thanked me for doing that. And then I said, hey, in return, could you do me this favor? We're going to do this experiment, and could you arrange to have a squad car pick them up? And he agreed. It just meant the study began in a dramatic, dynamic way, which would have been different if they simply came down and said, I'm here for the experiment. You sign in. They got to the basement feeling like I was a prisoner. And then the study, you know, it went on. Initially, the guards felt awkward in their uniforms. Nobody, I should say nobody, wanted to be a guard, because, again, all students Everywhere anti police. I mean, because the police were seen as supporters of the system. So they felt awkward. I mean, in fact, there is a Hollywood movie which debuted in 2015 called the Stanford Prison Experiment, directed by Kyle Alvarez, a really good movie. And it begins with interviews of each participant saying, you want to be a prisoner of guard. And everybody said, I don't want to be a guard. Nobody likes guards. You know, guards are pigs. And that's actually what happened in our interviews with them. But curiously, very quickly they got into the role, meaning they enjoyed the power that's inherent in the role of a guard. And then what they started to do is push the prisoners in more and more extreme ways. Obviously, when you begin, you know, you got to have the prisoners do something. So they did push ups and jumping jacks and other things. But then that, that gets boring. And curiously, boredom is a major motivation of evil, because now you're bored and you got eight hours to kill, especially the ones who came in at night. I mean, so you got eight hours, you come in at 10 o', clock, you got to kill time till 6am and so they became creatively evil.

Once you put a uniform on and are given a role, I mean a job, saying your job is to keep these people in line, then you're not, certainly not the same person as if you were in street clothes and in a different role. You really become that person once you put on that khaki uniform, you put on the glasses, you put on, you take the nightstick and you know, you, you act the.

They had to think of new things to do each day which were interesting, which were exciting for them. And the only limitation I put on, I played the role of superintendent of the prison, which is a mistake. I should have been only the researcher and get someone else to play that role. Because if you're superintendent of the prison, your main concern are the guards and the institution and not the prisoners. And so prisoners began to have emotional breakdowns in 36 hours. At the end of 36 hours, a prisoner had an emotional breakdown. Screaming, irrationally, yelling. He was at prison 8612 and we had to release him. And then he became a model of how you get out. And each day thereafter, another prison had a breakdown. Everybody knew it was. It was an experiment, an experiment. Not in a prison, in the basement of psychology department, a basement where everybody was playing games. I'm a prisoner, you be the guard. But it transcended that reality. It became a psychological prison run by psychologists, not by the state.

I didn't see where it was really harmful, it was degrading. And that was part of my particular little experiment to see how I could. Your particular little experiment? Why don't you tell me about that? I was running little experiments of my own. Tell me about your little experiment.

I'm curious.

I wanted to see just what kind of verbal abuse that people can take before they start objecting, before they start lashing back.

Yeah.

Under the circumstances. And it surprised me that no one said anything to stop me.

No one.

No one said, kermit, you can't say those things to me. Those things are sick. Nobody said that. They just accepted what I said. I said, you know, go tell that man to the face. He's the scum of the earth. And they do it without question. They'd do push ups without question. They'd sit in the hole, they'd. They'd abuse each other. And here they're supposed to have a little. They're supposed to be together as a unit in jail, but here they're abusing each other because I requested them to. And no one questioned my authority at all. And it really shocked me. Why didn't people. When I started to get abused people so much, I started to get so profane that. And still people didn't say anything.

We did all the things that you would have in a real prison. We had visitors days, we had parole board hearings, we had visitors by a Catholic priest who had been a prison chaplain. So we had all of those things. I mean, so each day lots of stuff was happening. And the only thing we insisted on, and we say it over no physical force, that is, the guards were not allowed to hit the prisoners with their club. It was all symbolic because then it was worried somebody would seriously get hurt, but they used psychological force. And so at the end of six days, I had to terminate the study because it was out of control. I mean, that each. I'm saying, each day, each night, the guards are thinking of something more and more cruel and horrendous. So, for example, on the fifth night, the guards say, okay, we're going to play a game. We're going to play camel game. You prisoners bend over your female camels, you guys are male camels, get behind them and hump them. And they're like, oh, hump. And they actually were simulating sodomy after five days in the Stanford Prison Experiment. Now jump ahead to 2004 Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where American prison guards had prisoners simulating fellatio. But that was within three months. So there are many Parallels between what happened in the Stanford prison study, which was a fake experiment, and this real experiment in Abu Ghraib. And curiously, I became an expert witness. One of the guards there, Chip Frederick. And my defense was that everything I found out about him, he was a really good guy, a good father, good husband, good soldier. Until he went down to that basement on 12 hour shifts, never left the prison because it was dangerous. So when they finished a 12 hour shift, they slept in a different cell in a different part of the prison. So I just said what he did was a function of the power of the situation that overwhelmed his humanity. And curiously, it's one of the only times I know of where a psychological defense had a legal consequence. Positive. Originally, the military were going to punish him with 15 years hard labor in prison, and I got his sentence reduced to four years. So that's a big victory in corporate psychology. And so we ended the study on August 19, 1971 rumor, or what I've.

Read says that you had to be told by your then girlfriend to stop this. Oh, yeah, even you got into the role of superintendent.

Yeah, that's the other thing. It's right when I say we ended it. She made me end it. Christina Maslach, who had been a graduate student of mine, who had graduated Stanford with a PhD in psychology, had just gotten a job at Berkeley in June, and we were planning to move in together. And she came down on Thursday night and she said, how about we go to dinner after the end of the night shift? And she comes down and what she sees is the guards lining up the prisoners, putting bags over their head, chaining their legs one to another, yelling, cursing, screaming, pushing them down. And then this is the last time they could go to the toilet. After that, they had to urinate or defecate in buckets in their cell, which they hated to do because it smelled terrible. And, and, but they're cursing them and yelling. And she said, I said, oh, look at this. Isn't this exciting? Look at the dynamics of the situation after only four days. Look what you're seeing. And she said, I can't look at it, it's horrible. So she ran out and I ran after her. We're now in the, in the courtyard in front of Jordan Hall. We're having this huge argument and I'm talking about the psychology of dehumanization. And she's talking about that the situation has changed me, that I am known to be a caring, loving professor who loves students. Students love him. And now you see, you, not only you're allowing this terrible thing to happen. Then she said, if this is the real you, I don't think I want to continue our relationship. And that was bam, punch in the face, turning point. I said, oh, my God, you're right. I have to end this study. I didn't know what's gotten into me because I. That's what I'm saying. I should have not played the role of superintendent because now what was important was the continuity of my institution, not the validity of the experiment. Because we could have ended after Second Prisoner broke down because we proved our point and then we ended it. So I ended it the next day.

So everybody listening to this is now saying, I don't know about those guys in the 1970s, but I would never get carried away. I would never accept the role of prisoner. I would not accept the role of guard, for sure. To which you say you did it for the money.

I mean, the point is right now, if I said, I'll give you $50 a day to play at. We're doing a drama, you know, in a drama, I'm the director and you're the actors. If you don't want to act, then go away. You know, some people did. Not Everybody of the 75 people came down that after we interviewed them, we said, here's what we want to do. Someone said, no, I'd rather not. So right now I'm saying if I raised the ante and you needed money and I say, we want you to play a role for a week, I'm sure I could get.

I believe that. But I think my point was that I think people are saying that, yes, maybe those people became guards and overzealous, but I would not be. Well, I think your point is everybody would be.

Again, you don't know what you would do in a totally new situation. That's the whole point is you've never been in that situation. And you'd like to think I would take the good me into all these situations. And this is what soldiers say before they go to battle. And then you get in battle and suddenly you're killing, you're raping, you're doing murderous things. One of the point in the prison study is how well do you really know yourself other than in your regular life? You have the freedom to choose situations that are comfortable, that don't challenge you, that you choose friends who are similar to you. You really connect with people, even different religions, different ethnicity, different backgrounds. So you know about yourself from a very limited amount of information other than.

Being thrust into these roles. How can one know? Or you really don't know?

No, you don't. You don't know until you don't know. Until you're, you're playing a role. I mean, until you're in, in that situation. And what we're saying is the prison study should speed along to say, under these circumstances, I could do something which is contrary to my beliefs, my conscience, my well being.

Now, let's fast forward to now. So this has enormous implication on ice. Yeah, probably many of those ICE guards are okay people, they're good apples.

Yeah. But again, it's, it's a nice guy, it's a nice transition because there have been lots of studies, for example, of Nazi SS guards who were good guys before they got into the setting. And now you're in the setting and you become part of it. You're in a uniform like everyone else. And the head of the unit says, here are the rules. Here's what we do. Here's what, here's what you're getting paid for. Here's your job. And if you don't do it right, we get rid of you, get somebody to replace you. And so again with these ICE officers, their job is to round up aliens, immigrants, and send them back where they came from. And they're doing it with the support of the President of the United States. They're doing it with the support of everybody around them. And typically they don't physically beat up the prisoners. All they have to do is handcuff them. Sometimes the prisoners rebel. They could push them down on the ground. So it's not even as bad as in my study where the guards toward the end were physically harming the prisoners.

In your study, they physically harmed.

At the 36th hour, the prisoners rebelled on the second day and the guards had to physically overwhelm them. And they stripped them naked. And then after that I said no physical force. But they did. I mean, their initial impulse was there are 12 guards and nine prisoners. We have to physically dominate them. So, but I think with the ICE officers, it's not physical domination. They have a gun, they have tear gas, they have handcuffs. And their job is round these, round these people up who are law breakers and send them back where they came from. So they develop a mentality that these others are non acceptable human beings.

We're talking about a slippery slope of evil. Right, Basically. And how do you reverse that? How do you stop that?

It's avoiding that first step. So a parallel set of research was done earlier than mine by Stanley Milgram. He was at Yale University. And he did the studies, famous studies on blind obedience to authority. And those I won't go through in great detail. But essentially in those studies, two men came to the lab and an authority said, we want to see how we can improve people's memory. There's a lot of research shows if we reward the right answers, people improve. We want to see what happens if you punish wrong answers. One of you is the teacher, one of you is the learner. And the teacher gets material, gives it to the learner. When the learner gets it wrong, you should give them a shock. Now, the critical thing is there's a big shock box starting with 15 volts and increasing in 15 volt increments. 15, 30, 45. But then it goes up to 100 and 200 and 300. And at the end of the line is 450 xxx. And the question is, who would do it now? I mean, who would go all the way? When Milgram, before he started his study, he described it in great detail, more than I'm doing with you. And he said, what percent of all American citizens would go all the way? There were 40 psychiatrists and their average was 1% because they said that's psychopathic and only 1% of any population is psychopaths. They were wrong. It was 65. Two of every three of hundreds and hundreds of people in the study. And these were men, middle aged men 20 to 50, and even one group of women were the same. Two of every three went all the way. Now, I made a detour back to your question. What do you do at the beginning? You don't press the first button. When you press the first button, you're on that slippery slope of viva, because you look at the panel. Why would they make this box with all these numbers, with all these different voltages if they didn't expect somebody to go there? So the key is, soon as you see the first thing, if you press it and nothing happens, you say, I quit. I asked Milgram how many people of the thousand you tested refused to press the first button. Zero. No one, because it was no big deal. But the point is, you're an adult, you look at the box and say, why would they make this if they didn't expect some people to go, and I don't never want to be in that situation. So partly it's developing a foresight to look at a situation and step back before you enter it, before you cross that line. And they say, what could be the worst thing that could happen in this situation? To me, to other people. What's the worst thing I could end up doing that I will be sorry for later on? And so it's anticipating negative consequences of your behavior and saying, boy Scout motto, be prepared. Be prepared, in this case, for the worst, and therefore, don't do it.

But we just said that zero of a thousand could do that.

See, I'm saying the important thing now is to train people. You show them the Milgram study and say, what would you do? What should you do? And you showed them the Stanford Prison Experiment. If you were a guard, what would you do? You could have been a good guard. You could have collected your money. Nobody told them. All you had to do was maintain law and order and see the prisoners don't escape. That's bottom line. So you didn't have to do any of those other things, even though you thought this is what gods do. So essentially, it's rewriting the script. You say, when I'm in the study, I'm not using your script. I'm using my script.

So are you saying that there's evil in all of us, or are you saying that there's a lack of good?

I mean, what.

No, I'm saying that. No, I think I'd like to say there were equal parts of good and evil, and they come out depending on the situation. I mean, if I put you in a boy Scout camp and I say, here's our Boy Scout motto and do good helping other people. And in fact, the transition now is in the last chapter of the Luther Effect. If you put good people in a bad situation and they become corrupted, what happens if you put ordinary people in a good situation? And the idea is, I believe we could make them not only become good, but make them be everyday heroes.

What do you want your legacy to be?

He made the world better by creating a new generation of youth dedicated to helping others in need that I would be really happy for. And he built this on the platform of EO Stanford Prison Experiment.

So now you know that the reason Zimbardo stopped the experiment was because his girlfriend made him do it. If you want to help Zimbardo empower the next generation of heroes, check out the Heroic imagination project@ heroicimagination.org I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this was the Remarkable People podcast. This podcast was produced by Jeff. Some things need to be seed to be believed. See? Special thanks to Pig Fitzpatrick. If you subscribe to Remarkable People, Pig probably had something to do with it. In the next episode, I'm interviewing one of the smartest people I've ever met. Stephen Wolfram. Physicist, entrepreneur, and the youngest winner of the MacArthur Award. This is remarkable people.