A professor emeritus of Stanford University, Zimbardo received numerous awards for his distinguished teaching, creative research, dedicated social action, and career-long contributions to social psychology. Zimbardo devoted his career to teaching, scientific research, the practice of psychology, and applying psychological knowledge to improve the human condition. Zimbardo authored over 500 articles, chapters, and books on topics that range from persuasion, dissonance, shyness, time perspective, deindividuation, cults, and obedience to authority. Many of his books have been reprinted and translated into multiple languages. 

Born in 1933 and raised in the Bronx in New York, Zimbardo became the first member of his Sicilian American family to pursue a college degree following graduation from James Monroe High School. He attended Brooklyn College where he earned a B.A. in 1954, triple majoring in psychology, sociology and anthropology. Zimbardo then went on to earn his M.A. in 1955 and his PhD in 1959 from Yale University, both in psychology. In the early 1960s, he held teaching positions at Yale University, Columbia University, and New York University, where he developed a research program focusing on attitude change and cognitive dissonance. Notably shifting his research from running the rat lab to examining human behavior, Zimbardo’s early training spanned hypnosis at the Morton Prince Clinic in New York, co-directing the Children’s Test Anxiety Research Project at Yale University, and creating a “A Head Start-Black Pride” summer program in Harlem. Zimbardo became involved with anti-war demonstrations and co-authored a publication “Canvassing for Peace.” 

Zimbardo relocated to California to join the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University from 1968 to 2003. Following retirement, he continued to lecture at Stanford and taught at Palo Alto University and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

His passionate approach to teaching introductory psychology courses dovetailed with his involvement in educational media and authorship of the long-running textbooks Psychology and Life and Psychology: Core Concepts. A charismatic speaker, dedicated to making class memorable, the popularity of his courses became legendary. Highly regarded as a generous educator and mentor, he inspired thousands of students and educators to become interested in the field of psychology, many of whom went on to careers in academia and clinical practice. 

His radiant warmth and passionate approach to the ethos of “giving psychology away”—introducing academic and non-academic audiences alike to the field and its real-world applications—led many students around the world to call him  “Uncle Phil”. The timeliness of his varied research and books garnered Zimbardo many media appearances on national TV and radio, among them the Phil Donahue Show, the Today Show, Good Morning America, 60 Minutes, 20/20, Nightline, That’s Incredible, NPR, among others. Described as the “voice and face of psychology,” Zimbardo appeared on-screen in educational media projects, namely as the narrator, writer, and scientific advisor for Discovering Psychology, PBS-TV/ Annenberg Corporation Video 26-program series, which has been translated and distributed throughout the world (1989, updated 2001 telecourse). Zimbardo also participated as a consultant on the British TV program The Human Zoo (LWT, 2001).

Zimbardo has received numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, and writer, for his service to the profession. Awards include the Havel Foundation Vision Award, CSSP Sagan Award for Promoting Public Understanding of Science, and the APA Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest, as well as honorary degrees from universities in many countries, including Sweden, Austria, Greece, Peru, Czech Republic, and the US.

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His professional leadership included serving as president of the American Psychological Association and the Western Psychological Association (twice), chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP), and participation on boards and as a member of several professional psychology organizations. 

Zimbardo further contributed to campus life as the director of the Stanford University Social Psychology Research Training Program and a co-director of the Stanford Hypnosis Research Lab. He served on the executive committee of The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Stanford University. 

Best known to a wider public is his Stanford Prison Experiment (1971, with Banks, W.C., Haney, C., and Jaffe, D.), which demonstrated the power of social situations to shape people’s behavior. While Zimbardo was invited to speak about the study to the press and in talks throughout his career, its impact notably informed his research on related areas. Zimbardo testified before Congress on the need for prison reform, and served as an expert witness in an Abu Ghraib prison case. He later collaborated with a Greek colleague on investigating government torturers in Brazil; with Italian colleagues on political issues, personality, and disobedience to authority; and with American colleagues on veterans with PTSD.

In the early 1970s, Zimbardo used a prison metaphor to reconceptualize and study the personal experience of shyness. Following research on shyness, Zimbardo founded in 1975 and then co-directed the Stanford Shyness Clinic (later an offsite clinic and institute under Dr. Lynne Henderson; today a clinic at The Gronowski Center, Palo Alto University). His publications on shyness included the popular books Shyness (1977) and The Shy Child (1981; 1999 with Radl, S.L.). 

In the late 1990s, based on Zimbardo’s innovative ideas and research measure of time perspective, and development of the widely used Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, he helped initiate the International Research Network on Time Perspective. Its president, Anna Sircova, organized a large cross-cultural study, international symposia and conferences for more than a hundred international researchers who conduct global studies. His co-authored books include The Time Paradox (2008, with Boyd, J.) and The Time Cure (2012, with Sword, R. and Sword, R.K.M.). An edited volume of time perspective research, Time perspective:  Theory, research and application. Essays in honor of Philip Zimbardo, was published in 2015. 

As part of his award-wining and best-selling book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007), Zimbardo concluded with a chapter that would inspire his focus in the final years of his life – to understand, amplify and promote “everyday heroism.”  He founded the nonprofit Heroic Imagination Project (2010–present) whose national and international educational programs and centers teach people how to resist behaviors such as bullying, bystanding, and negative conformity and encourage positive social action. This program has gone global with its training exercises, in nations beyond the United States, including Hungary, Italy, Poland and Indonesia.

In his final years, he joined with longtime co-author Robert Johnson to write a different perspective on psychology based on the works of Shakespeare, Psychology According to Shakespeare (2024, with Johnson).

The Philip G. Zimbardo Papers (SC0750), and his oral history, are available to researchers through the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California. 

For more information about Zimbardo’s career, please explore these online resources and see his curriculum vitae