Philip Zimbardo:
Much yet to write

In psychology, said Zimbardo, publishing a text or trade book is almost negative to colleagues because it takes away from teaching and research publications and is "commercial." Obviously Zimbardo isn't worried about negative attention. His 14th edition of Psychology and Life, the 13th edition of which recently won TAA's McGuffey award for excellence, came out in 1997.

In 1971 Zimbardo took over updating Psychology and Life from Floyd Ruch, who wrote the first seven editions, and will begin the process of handing it over to Richard Gerrig from the State University of New York at Stonybrook for the next edition. Zimbardo said he particularly liked "changing the orientation of the book to fit the times and what I wanted to do with the book."

When he updated the book in 1971, he added a fifth psychological "goal" to the book: To use psychology to improve the human condition. This goal, he said, showed how an author's values can influence teaching. "It helped to influence psychologists' concerns for applying their knowledge," he said. "The changes I made in the eighth edition had a greater focus on social relationships, humanistic issues and thinking processes than any other current text."

One McGuffey judge said of Zimbardo's text: "This was the very first 'student-oriented' introductory psychology text. It has set the standard for such an approach for over five decades. It is clearly the single most influential book in the history of teaching of introductory psychology."

Zimbardo has won more than 24 awards, including seven outstanding teaching awards, the most recent in spring 1995. "Teaching was a natural career. I always wanted to be a teacher," said Zimbardo, who turned 62 in 1997. "I've always been interested in ideas -- getting them and giving them away," said Zimbardo. "Writing is never easy, it's hard, isolating work, but I'm writing about what I teach so I'm always up-to-date about current research and communicating it to students. I don't look ahead to the finished product. What is most motivating are short term things like how can I explain this in an interesting way?"

Zimbardo was graduated with honors from Brooklyn College in 1954 and received his master's from Yale in 1955 and his doctorate in 1959. He began teaching at Yale in 1958 and in 1961 moved to New York University. He has been at Stanford University the last 27 years.

He is a member of 18 professional associations, has served on 20 consultations and boards, has addressed more than 100 universities throughout the world, and has appeared on more than 20 talk shows including the Phil Donahue Show, Good Morning America and ABC's 20/20. "I enjoy telling the average person what's interesting about psychology," he said.

He has published four research articles in the journal of Science, the most prestigious journal in the field, and six articles in Psychology Today. "It's rare to have been published that many times in such a prestigious journal," said Zimbardo. "Yet it's also rare to be able to popularize psychology while also writing for colleagues."

Zimbardo's most popular textbooks are Psychology of Life, Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence and The Cognitive Control of Motivation. Shyness: What it is What To Do About It is in its sixth printing and in 10 translations. He has also written a video teaching series called Discovering Psychology, 26 half-hour programs that have aired on Annenberg/CPB public television. The programs offer full introductory psychology credit for people who also read a textbook and take a standardized test. More than 60,000 people have gotten course credit in the past five years. Zimbardo narrated the series himself, something most writers don't do. "The design of the whole series and program was mine. I wrote 800 pages of background material," said Zimbardo. "The series was my video course in psychology. It was just natural to narrate it myself."

He is best known for his work on the "psychology of evil," ways in which good people can be seduced into doing something evil, as well as his shyness studies.

Zimbardo is currently working as a consultant on an upcoming HBO movie about his 1971 prison experiment in which he tried to demonstrate what happens when you put good people in a bad place. "By putting good, normal people in either positions of power as guards, or making them powerless, as prisoners, we found that some situations can overwhelm the best of us," said Zimbardo.

His work on shyness in adults, the first of its kind, began right after the prison study. "Shyness is a kind of self-imposed prison," said Zimbardo. "No one had ever systematically studied shyness in adults before." A 1975 article on shyness got a big reader response. So big that Addison-Wesley, a major publishing name, told him to hurry up and write a book about it.

And hurry he did. He wrote Shyness: What It Is, What To Do About It, in one week. He and developmental editor Ann Dillworth, from Addison-Wesley, took adjacent rooms in the Stanford Holiday Inn. Zimbardo said he hypnotized himself so he could focus without distraction, and wrote eight to 10 hours in a row in long hand. Dillworth would come in at the end of the day to edit copy his secretary had typed. "I would write until my hand got numb, go to sleep, and get up and do it again the next day," said Zimbardo. He said he did a chapter a day that way. Shyness has sold more than 400,000 copies. "I'm sure I could never do it again, but it was nice to do it once in my youth," he said.

He hasn't written a book that way since, but he has written many other things, something he said is never easy, but he still enjoys the process. "You get into the flow, you get into the language. It's rewarding when a good metaphor emerges or you discover a new connection," he said.

Zimbardo sees writing a textbook as a major accomplishment and always throws a party after finishing a project. "When I finished the first edition of Psychology and Life, I gave a big party and invited everybody," he said. "Finishing a book should be a celebration and it shouldn't be taken for granted. When I look at a book that I published I can't believe I did this massive thing. It's a tremendous amount of work. I couldn't see not celebrating it."

"If you give up all the personal pleasures you must in order to write and not take pride in the finished product, that's sad," he said. "It's also the way my role model, Zorba the Greek, would want it--to celebrate life (and psychology) at every opportunity."

— reported by Kim Pawlak, 1997