Situations can have a more powerful influence over our behaviour than most people appreciate, and few people recognize.

Philip Zimbardo

Psychologists

Philip Zimbardo

American social psychologist (1933-2024) best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, a study cast into serious doubt by Thibault Le Texier's 2018 archival audit. He defined situationism for a generation through The Lucifer Effect (2007), arguing that good people commit harm inside bad systems rather than out of bad character. Later in life he developed Time Perspective Theory with John Boyd, founded the Heroic Imagination Project to train everyday resistance to bullying and conformity, and served as APA president in 2002. His complicated legacy now sits at the centre of the discipline's replication-crisis debate, prized for public reach and questioned for laboratory method.

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