Psychologist and author of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo dies

American psychologist, scientist and author of the controversial "Stanford Prison Experiment" Philip Zimbardo has died at his home in San Francisco at the age of 91. Stanford University reported this.

As the report says, Zimbardo died on October 14; the cause of death is not stated.

Zimbardo taught at Stanford University from 1968 to 2003, and in 1971, together with W. Curtis Banks, Craig Haney, and David Jaffe, he conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, aimed at studying the behavior of people in prison situations. Subsequently, the experiment was repeatedly criticized by Zimbardo's colleagues. As part of it, 24 college student volunteers were divided into two groups: “guards” and “prisoners.” The experiment took place in a makeshift prison set up in a university basement and was originally designed to last two weeks, but was forced to end after just 6 days because most of the “guards” began to show sadistic tendencies, and the “prisoners” experienced acute anxiety and depression. At the same time, Zimbardo played the role of the prison warden in the experiment (and was not an outside observer) and, according to critics of the experiment, he provoked the participants to cruelty, freeing them from responsibility. Subsequently, already in the 2000s, Zimbardo admitted that he could not repeat this experiment “legally.”

Philip Zimbardo was born in 1933 in New York. Studied at Brooklyn College and Yale University. From 1960 to 1967, he was a professor of psychology at New York University's College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to the “prison experiment,” he conducted many studies, becoming one of the founders of social psychology. He studied topics such as shyness, altruism, compassion, hypnosis and cults.