Essay on Phillip Zombardo

Philip Zimbardo was born on March 23, 1933 in New York City. He attended Brooklyn College where he earned a B.A. in 1954, triple majoring in psychology, sociology and anthropology. He then went on to earn his M.A. in 1955 and his Ph.D. in 1959 from Yale University, both in psychology. He taught for a little at Yale before becoming a psychology professor at New York University, where he taught until 1967. After a year of teaching at Columbia University, he became a staff member at Stanford University in 1968 and has been there since. Philip Zimbardo is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department in 1971. The people in the study were 24 male college students who were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or "prisoners" in the mock prison. The study was so posted to last two weeks, but had to be stoped after just six days because of the crazy reactions and behaviors of the participants. The guards began displaying cruel and weird behavior toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became depressed and stressed out. Since the famous prison experiment Zimbardo has continued to research on a variety of topics including shyness, cult behavior and heroism. He has an authored and coauthored a lot books, including some that are used in university level psychology courses. Some people may recognize him as the host of the Discovering Psychology video series, which has aired on PBS and is often used in

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