Professor Philip Zimbardo

Keynote address: “On making the teachable moment a memorable psychological experience.”

Philip Zimbardo, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University (since 1968), is internationally recognised as an innovative researcher in many areas of psychology. He has won numerous awards for his distinguished teaching, writing, research, and media productions.

Zimbardo has been called the “voice and image of modern psychology” because of his popular PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology (shown nationally and internationally for the past decade), and his best selling text, Psychology and Life, the oldest, continuously selling textbook in psychology (now in its 16th edition).  He has been President of the American Psychological Association (2002) and twice of the Western Psychological Association.

He has also taught at Yale, Columbia, Barnard College, and New York University. This is the sixth decade in which he has taught introductory psychology to many thousands of students.

Zimbardo is a generalist, although his major focus is in social psychology. His research spans more than a dozen areas from animal research on curiosity, sexual behaviour and drugs, to human research on persuasion, cults, hypnosis, vandalism, violence, time perspective, evil, and madness. He has more than 300 professional publications, including 50 scholarly, text and trade books.

His Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) is a classic demonstration of the power of situational forces to overwhelm ordinary, good people. The web site documenting the chronology of that study has received more than eight million unique page viewers in the past two years. NBC will air a documentary on the study later this year and a major Hollywood movie is under contract.

Considered a leading expert in the area of shyness in adults, Zimbardo’s popular trade books continue to be best sellers. Zimbardo’s pioneering treatment for shyness has continued for the past 25 years at the Shyness Clinic in Palo Alto (now directed by Dr. Lynne Henderson).

The 26 episodes of the PBS-TV series, Discovering Psychology, which he created, co-wrote and hosts, is now a staple in most college and high school courses in the United States and in ten countries worldwide; the Updated Edition (just made in 2001) is shown regularly on PBS.