This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Philip Zimbado grew up poor in New York City in the South Bronx.

As he went to school and played in his neighborhood,

he noticed something. There were lots of ways for kids from poor families

to get into trouble.

One of the things about growing up poor is you're surrounded by evil, meaning people whose job

it is to get good kids to do bad things for money.

And even as a little kid, I was always curious about why some kids got seduced and other

kids like me were able to resist.

Was some kids smarter, tougher?

Lots of people might draw such conclusions, but from an early age, Phil found himself interested

in another explanation. The context in which a good kid would do something bad, the situation.

At school, James Monroe High School also in the Bronx, Phil got close to a classmate who was interested in the same questions.

And it was a little Jewish kid named Stanley Milgram.

We were in the same class.

We sat side by side.

He was the smartest kid in the class. He won all the medals at graduation so

obviously nobody liked him because we were all envious of him. But he was super smart and super

serious.

If you know anything about psychology, you will know that these teenagers

went on to become two of the most influential psychologists in history.

Phil became famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where he turned the University's

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