Quotes from Philip Zimbardo

Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school.

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.

The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver's skills or intentions.

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.

Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.

I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures. Why do good people sometimes act evil? Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.

Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.

Every evil starts with 15 volts.

It's not a question of getting more moral soldiers. Instead it's a question of recognizing how the situation of war (and the cultural institutions/practices of the military that we have designed to "prepare" people for that situation) creates monsters out of us all.

People are less rational than they are adept at rationalizing--explaining away discrepancies between their private morality and actions contrary to it.

The very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination and evil in some of us can inspire the heroic imagination in others.

Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do--given the same situational forces.

La difusión de la imagen visual de ese enemigo en carteles y en portadas de revista, en la televisión , en cine y en Internet, hace que esa imagen se fije en los recovecos de nuestro cerebro primitivo, en el sistema límbico, donde residen las potentes emociones del miedo y el odio. El efecto Lucifer

All evil begins with fifteen volts.