The Psychology of Evil | Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo (0:00)

In fact, on the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled, locked themselves in their cell, refused to come out, cursed the guards.

And that's when the guard said, these are dangerous prisoners. So that redefines everything, is that they're not students playing the role of prisoner or guard, they are dangerous prisoners. And what do you do with dangerous prisoners? You have to dominate them. And that's what we saw emerging. Thank you for watching.

Michael Gervais (0:34)

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm Michael Gervais, and by trade and training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist. And I'm fortunate to work with some of the most extraordinary thinkers and doers across the planet. And the whole idea behind these conversations, behind this podcast, is to learn from people, to pull back the curtain, to explore how they've committed to mastering both their craft and their minds. Now, our minds are flat out our greatest asset. And if you want to learn more about how you can train your mind, this is just a quick little reminder right here to check out the Online Psychological Training Course, where we pull together the best practices to meet that unique intersection of high performance and wellbeing. We walk through 16 essential principles and skills for you to train your mind. In the same way that we train world-class athletes, you can find it at findingmastery.net forward slash course.

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Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Philip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at psychology at Stanford University and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

So Dr. Zimbardo has spent over 50 years teaching psychology and he's an absolute legend in the field. He's written more than 60 books and has over 600 publications, professional popular articles and chapters and books. A few of the books that you might recognize are Psychology and Life, that's a textbook, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, The Time Cure, and most recently, Man Interrupted. His current research looks at the psychology of heroism, asking what forces push some people to become perpetrators of evil while others act heroically on behalf of people in need.