― Philip G. Zimbardo
“The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“Fear is the State's psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“Jerry-5486: "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that's why they broke down—just couldn't stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Majority decisions tend to be made without engaging the systematic thought and critical thinking skills of the individuals in the group. Given the force of the group's normative power to shape the opinions of the followers who conform without thinking things through, they are often taken at face value. The persistent minority forces the others to process the relevant information more mindfully. Research shows that the deciscions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful and creative when there is minority dissent than when it is absent.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant —
because you're always going against the conformity of the group.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect
“I’ve always been curious about the psychology of the person behind the mask...”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“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?”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Most of us perceive Evil as an entity, a quality that is inherent in some people and not in others. Bad seeds ultimately produce bad fruits as their destinies unfold. . . Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes ‘good people’ off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“Our personal identities are socially situated. We are where we live, eat, work, and make love. [...]
Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us. The expectations of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“One can't live mindfully without being enmeshed in psychological processes that are around us.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Our personal identities are socially situated. We are where we live, eat, work and make love. It is possible to predict a wide range of your attitudes and behavior from knowing any combination of "status" factors - your ethnicity, social class, education, and religion and where you live - more accurately than by knowing your personality traits. Our sense of identity is in large measure conferred on us by others in the ways they treat or mistreat us, recognize or ignore us, praise us or punish us. Some people make us timid and shy; others elicit our sex appeal and dominance. In some groups we are made leaders, while in others we are reduced to being followers. We come to live up to or down to the expectations others have of us. The expectation of others often become self-fulfilling prophecies. Without realizing it, we often behave in ways that confirm the beliefs others have about us. Those subjective beliefs can create new realities for us. We often become who other people think we are, in their eyes and in our behavior.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“Our ability to selectively engage and disengage our moral standards . . . helps explain how people can be barbarically cruel in one moment and compassionate the next. —Albert Bandura20”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“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.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others—or using one’s authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf. In short, it is “knowing better but doing worse.”4”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“While no one can change events that occurred in the past, everyone can change attitudes and beliefs about them.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
“The ideal of the military hero is clearly echoed in other contexts, and it includes those who routinely risk their health and lives in the line of duty, such as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men. – Camille Paglia, professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“One reason the jobs men hold pay more is because they are more hazardous … Just as the ‘glass ceiling’ describes the invisible barrier that keeps women out of jobs with the most pay, the ‘glass cellar’ describes the invisible barrier that keeps men in jobs with the most hazards. – Warren Farrell”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“If you don't think much of yourself, why should I, since you obviously know yourself better than anyone else?”
― Philip G. Zimbardo
“[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such ‘self affirmations,’ by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.2”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a ‘soft language’ to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, ‘toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“These days, it literally is all about ‘me’. In an analysis of over 750,000 books published between 1960 and 2008, Jean Twenge and her colleagues found that the use of first person plural pronouns (i.e. We, Us) decreased 10 per cent, while during this same timeframe, the use of first person singular pronouns (i.e. I, Me) increased 42 per cent, and second person pronouns (i.e. You, Your) quadrupled.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“a gamer’s enemy is social obligation: responsibilities, time management, dealing with real people and taking real risks.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
“You walk around the world and you see people multitasking. They’re playing games and they’re reading email and they’re on Facebook, etc … On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once … Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, You know what? You’re really lousy at it! It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse at analytical reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly.15”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“Our life, like the harmony of the world, is composed of contrast, also of varying tones, sweet and harsh, sharp and flat, soft and loud. If a musician liked one sort only, what effect would he make? He must be able to employ them together and blend them. And we too must accept the good and bad that coexist in our life. Our existence is impossible without this mixture, and one side is no less necessary to us than the other. – Michel de Montaigne, sixteenth-century French writer”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“insular”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“When a power elite wants to destroy an enemy nation, it turns to propaganda experts to fashion a program of hate. What does it take for the citizens of one society to hate the citizens of another society to the degree that they want to segregate them, torment them, even kill them? It requires a “hostile imagination,” a psychological construction embedded deeply in their minds by propaganda that transforms those others into “The Enemy.” That image is a soldier’s most powerful motive, one that loads his rifle with ammunition of hate and fear. The image of a dreaded enemy threatening one’s personal well-being and the society’s national security emboldens mothers and fathers to send sons to war and empowers governments to rearrange priorities to turn plowshares into swords of destruction.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. – Frederick Douglass, African-American social reformer and a leader of the abolitionist movement”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“Many males who we have surveyed said they felt most like a man when they were honest about who they were, confidently made decisions and actively pursued their dreams.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“But that meaningful respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way for others. It should not derive from out-drinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“Though the act of making one’s own bed is simple and mundane, it reiterates that the little things in life can have a significant impact. ‘If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right,’ he said.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“The pseudo-scientific myth that all women are naturally predisposed toward sexual restraint and all men toward promiscuity isn’t only inaccurate but dangerous, leading directly to the notion that women who differ from that norm are unacceptable, need to be corrected or deserve to be mistreated,’ says Zhana Vrangalova, professor of human sexuality at New York University.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again. – Abraham Maslow, humanist psychologist”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
“While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there’s this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male
