Philip Zimbardo
American social psychologist, author of Stanford Prison Experiment (1933–2024)
Philip George Zimbardo (; March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024) was an American psychologist and a professor at Stanford University. He was an internationally known educator, researcher, author and media personality in psychology who authored more than 500 articles, chapters, textbooks, and trade books covering a wide range of topics, including time perspective, cognitive dissonance, the psychology of evil, persuasion, cults, deindividuation, shyness, and heroism.
Zimbardo garnered great attention for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later criticized for its use of methods that allowed Zimbardo himself and whatever biases he may have had to influence the results. He authored various widely used, introductory psychology textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox.
Zimbardo was the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting heroism in everyday life by training people how to resist bullying, bystanding, and negative conformity. He pioneered The Stanford Shyness Clinic in the 1970s and offered the earliest comprehensive treatment program for shyness. He was the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and many awards and honors for service, teaching, research, writing, and educational media, including the Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science for his Discovering Psychology video series. He served as Western Psychological Association president in 1983 and 2001, and American Psychological Association president in 2002.
Early life and education
Zimbardo was born in New York City on March 23, 1933, to a second-generation Sicilian-American immigrant family. Early in life he experienced discrimination and prejudice, growing up poor on welfare in the South Bronx, and being Italian.
“Philip Zimbardo” enters the record as american social psychologist, author of Stanford Prison Experiment (1933–2024). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Philip, Zimbardo and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q296042. VIAF identifies the subject as 2593999. The Library of Congress control number is n79018387. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 2024, 1971 and 1983.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philip Zimbardo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.