Philip Zimbardo Character Analysis

Philip Zimbardo is a psychiatrist who is famous for creating the Stanford Prison Experiment. In that experiment, Zimbardo selected several young men to playact as “guards” and “prisoners” in the basement of a laboratory to observe whether deindividuation—the process of losing one’s identity and becoming more likely to display uninhibited behavior in a high-pressure situation—was a real phenomenon. Zimbardo’s experiment has long been regarded as successful, given how it seemed to show that when stripped of their identities and placed in pressurized power dynamics, people would quickly turn against one another. But in the years since the 1970s experiment, the integrity of the experiment has been questioned by many experts (and debunked by many participants, including Dave Eshelman, a “guard” who claimed he was only acting in the way he believed Zimbardo wanted him to.)