News
Zimbardo Talks Politics at Memorial Church
by Ryan Wisnesky
News Staff Writer

On Wednesday, October 22, Psychology Professor Phillip Zimbardo spoke to a packed side-pew at Memorial Church. His speech was part of Stanford’s popular “What Matters to Me and Why” speaker series sponsored by the Office for Religious Life. The series is designed for students and community members to get a glimpse of the personal views of professors and other campus figures in an intimate setting. Accordingly, Professor Zimbardo spoke on a range of topics from his childhood to his political views to his fascination with psychology.

After a brief introduction Professor Zimbardo began his speech with a few personal remarks, speaking about his marriage in Memorial Church, and how he had been looking forward to speaking to students in such an intimate environment.

Professor Zimbardo offerred a few opinions about how he hated power, control, secrecy, and lies, which “taken together are the Bush administration.” After remarking that he would try not to get political until the end of his talk, he spoke on politics for almost 15 minutes a one fourth of his allotted time.

I deplore the what the Bush Administration is doing to destroy America’s values,” he said, noting that social scientists tend to adopt a different way of thinking about evil than the present administration. Social scientists, according to Professor Zimbardo, are more concerned with understanding the ways in which any person can become evil.

“Take good people- after a time they are doing things they said they never would,” he said. Therefore, he said, the United States should focus more on solving the root of the terrorist threat than on directly combating terrorists themselves: “You will never eliminate terrorists if you take this dispositional approach- you must understand the hearts and minds of terrorists to understand what could make any one of use do the same.” He ended the political portion of his speech with an observation concerning the lack of dissent by faculty or staff on most college campuses.

Professor Zimbardo then recounted his childhood. He spent his early life poor and living in a ghetto, and said, “because of the gift of education, I am here.” Reflecting on his time as a young child in poverty, he said that a poor person’s mental state was always one of nothing but a simple presence in the moment, a simple mode of survival.

“When you are poor, you live in the moment- if there were no bars between where my father got off the subway, we would get the money [his father’s wages]”. He said that people in this mental state were more susceptible to addiction, because by living in the moment one is by definition not thinking about the consequences of one’s actions. “It’s either ‘are you going to do this’ or not” he said.

After speaking about his childhood, he spoke about his love for psychology. He received his only C grade in an introductory psychology course, which prompted him to vow that if he ever taught, he would use that C grade as an example of how he managed to achieve anyway. He said that because his C grade was due in part to poor teaching, he now considers bad teaching in Psych 1 to be a “sin.” Professor Zimbardo has taught introductory psychology in one form or another for decades, and his Psych 1 class here at Stanford has in the past been extremely popular; however, he has recently decided to stop teaching Psych 1.

While talking about psychology, Professor Zimbardo used his own personal experiences to put a human face on his assertions. As a somewhat sickly child, Professor Zimbardo spent some time in a clinic for ill children. He explained to the audience that he learned how to be charming to the nurses in order to obtain extra items from them. He used this behavior as an example to illustrate how shyness can be overcome.

“Over 40% of Americans think of themselves as shy,” he remarked. “There is a very small subset of people that actually want to be left alone,” he said, but noted that most people would rather not be shy. As a result Professor Zimbardo founded a shyness clinic to address this problem that still helps people become more outgoing to this day.

In order to illustrate how every person can at times be selfish, Professor Zimbardo related a story in which a friend of his had fallen ill and gone to a clinic to recover. As his friend’s condition improved, he was in danger of being removed from the clinic to make room for others. When another patient died, allowing his friend to stay, Professor Zimbardo’s first reaction was one of joy despite the tragedy.

Professor Zimbardo finished his talk by returning, as promised, to politics. “We are living in ‘1984’,” he said. “Calling it the War on Terror is as wrong as calling it the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs- we lost [both].”

Zimbardo continued by stating, “[T]he problem with the metaphor is that it has two armies that want to conquer. But terrorism is about psychology-Since we’ve labeled it a war we had to give it face a since Osama Bin Laden escaped, it became Saddam Hussein. Had we killed Osama Bin Laden, we would not have gone to war in Iraq,” he asserted.

In an effort to fully articulate the entirety of his beliefs rather than leaving the audience with an incomplete picture, Professor Zimbardo noted that “in Iraq we have left it to the military to create, which is not their job.” He also commented that “after vague nonspecific terror alerts frighten people, terrorists say, ‘why bother?’”

In closing, Professor Zimbardo stated that “the government has manipulated fear. If we were not afraid, we would not have given them support.” He said that the war was about oil and corporations, and closed with the statement, “assume everything you read is a lie until proven otherwise.”

The next speaker in the series will be Nancy Howe, Director of the Office of Student Activities, who will be speaking on Wednesday, October 29th.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:26:09 MST.