Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in 'total situations' that impact human nature.
Psychologists
Philip Zimbardo
American social psychologist (1933-2024) best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a study cast into serious doubt by Thibault Le Texier's 2018 archival audit. He defined situationism for a generation through The Lucifer Effect (2007), arguing that good people commit harm inside bad systems rather than out of bad character. Later in life he developed Time Perspective Theory with John Boyd, founded the Heroic Imagination Project to train everyday resistance to bullying and conformity, and served as APA president in 2002. His complicated legacy now sits at the centre of the discipline's replication-crisis debate, prized for public reach and questioned for laboratory method.
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Philip Zimbardo's Other Quotes
Situations can have a more powerful influence over our behaviour than most people appreciate, and few people recognize.
Your time perspective is a fundamental, powerful, but largely unrecognized way that your individual psychology influences your life and the world around you.
Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. They act when others are passive. They give up their egocentrism for their socio-centrism.
The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.
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Situations can have a more powerful influence over our behaviour than most people appreciate, and few people recognize.
-- Philip Zimbardo
The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.
-- Philip Zimbardo