"It is not just rank-and-file psychologists who are protesting. Former APA president Philip Zimbardo is an international expert on interrogation and torture, and the author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. We asked for his response to the oft-repeated argument that psychologists can protect prisoners from abuse. "I think that's a lie," he told us. "Nobody is paying psychologists to go to the prison to make life easier for the prisoners. Psychologists in operation in Guantánamo Bay, in Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan have almost no power to make any meaningful change. They are hired guns. You do what the boss wants, or you don't get back. So to say that psychologists are needed to maintain the dignity of prisoners, their health and so forth-that has no basis in reality.""
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPsychologists from the United StatesPeople from New York CitySociologists from the United StatesStanford University faculty
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Amy Goodman Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Philip Zimbardo
Philip George Zimbardo (March 23, 1933 – October 14, 2024) was a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He was president of the Heroic Imagination Project, famous for his Stanford prison study involving Groupthink processes and for authorship of various introductory psychology books and textbooks for college students, including The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox.
7 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Philip Zimbardo →
Related Quotes
"I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to en…"
"Whether we consider Nazi Germany or Abu Ghraib prison, there were many people who observed what was happening and sai…"
"The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the “heroic elect,” a myth that reinforces two basic human te…"
"The “Lucifer Effect” describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between g…"
"You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbit…"
"It becomes clear that the Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo experiments replicated, in a compressed time, the dynamics of au…"
"For him delicious flavors dwell In books as in old Muscatel."
"And in the evening, everywhere Along the roadside, up and down, I see the golden torches flare Like lighted street-la…"
"Song like a rose should be; Each rhyme a petal sweet; For fragrance, melody, That when her lips repeat The words, her…"
"Americans have always been especially prone to regard all things as resulting from the free choice of a free will. Pr…"