July 05, 2015
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, famous for his study of
evil, is fascinated by what was good in the Arab Spring. The uprisings against
dictatorship were an expression of profound moral courage, he says, a sign of
the rise of the individual. He finds this particularly intriguing because of
his latest focus, the Heroic Imagination Project (HIP), a non-profit
organization based in San Francisco he founded in 2010 to “transform negative
situations into positive change.”
In a lecture in March at the
American University in Cairo, Zimbardo, 82, explained his career shift from
examining the psychological drivers of evil to exploring the tenets of positive
action. He is best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in 1971,
which recruited male college students to role-play guards and prisoners in a
pseudo jailhouse. Even in the transparently simulated environment, Zimbardo
found, participants in the experiment were willing to torture other
participants psychologically—with “guards” sadistically humiliating “prisoners”
through acts such as stripping them naked, depriving them of sleep, and forcing
them to wear bags over their heads. He concluded that humans are not inherently
evil, yet can be driven to evil acts when operating within certain systems
under certain conditions. Zimbardo believes that his findings help explain the
notorious abuse of Iraqi inmates by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.
His research is the basis for the 2015 psychological thriller directed by Kyle
Patrick Alvarez, The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford and past
president of the American Psychological Association, deconstructed the Stanford
Prison Experiment in his 2008 book, The Lucifer Effect. While
traditional research studied the individual’s behavior to understand evil,
Zimbardo argues that evil should be examined on three levels—the individual,
the situational, and the systemic. Factors such as political tensions, he
explains, can contribute to manifestations of evil as much as a person’s
personality traits. If that is the case, he says, then people have the capacity
to suppress evil impulses because they can recognize the situational or systemic
factors contributing to them.
The process of writing Lucifer—“fifteen
chapters of ugliness and evil,” he recalls—inspired Zimbardo to shift his
research focus to investigate ways to resist evil. That in turn led to HIP,
which trains educators, students and non-profit organizations to identify
negative scenarios, such as bystander apathy, when an individual chooses to
follow the crowd and not act in the face of injustice. He developed an
educational program called Exploring Human Nature, which uses social psychology
research to build lessons that concentrate on the dynamics of situations rather
than the characteristics of individuals. It rests on the belief that ordinary
people are capable of taking extraordinary action.
HIP currently holds workshops in the United States,
China, and Europe. Zimbardo believes that HIP could be a positive influence in
Egypt’s ongoing political and social transition. HIP’s operating principles, he
explains, include the daily practice of heroism through deeds such as showing
compassion to others, being kind, helping, smiling, and making others feel
special and valued. Changing Egypt will require individuals to believe that
even in the face of significant obstacles they can be effective agents of
change. That, many would agree, will be another revolution.