Hello and welcome to Speaking of Psychology, a podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

I'm your host, Caitlin Luna. I'm joined by Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University,

perhaps most well known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Over his 60-decade career,

Dr. Zimbardo has done research, written books,

and given TED Talks on a wide variety of topics, including evil, time, men's health, and shyness.

Welcome, Dr. Zimbardo.

Thank you. Great to be here with you.

And so now you're in a new venture called the Heroic Imagination Project, which inspires

everyday heroism.

Can you talk about that premise and explain how you train to be heroes?

Yes.

I would like everybody in the world to be a hero in training.

And the idea was that after I did the Stanford Prison Study, which really in 1971, which is really a follow-up of the earlier work by Stanley Milgram,

and many people don't know that little Stanley and I were in the same high school class at James Unruh High School in the Bronx in the 50s.

But his research showed how easy it is for good people to violate their conscience

and harm another person at the request of an authority. I wanted to expand that to say,

you know, more evil happens when people are playing roles, but nobody tells you to do anything wrong,

but in that role, it becomes what you do.

So if you're a prison guard, your job is to suppress prison riots.

Your job is to dominate, control prisoners.

And so there was a body of research now in social psychology.

Milgram's study, my study,

...