My life revealed

Philip Zimbardo

• Publisher: Giunti
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9788809956957
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In a direct and spontaneous dialogue, the legendary American psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about his life and career: his childhood in the Bronx, his university education at Yale, his friendship with Stanley Milgram, his appointment to the Stanford psychology faculty, his research, and his contributions in the psychological field and in the academic context, as well as his involvement in political activism, from meeting Malcolm X to writing an article on President Donald Trump's mental health, published in Psychology Today. The resulting memoir is a rich collection of moving stories and insightful reflections on his career and his intellectual legacy. The text - edited by Daniel Hartwig - is in interview form and is part of the Stanford Historical Society's Oral History Program in collaboration with the Stanford University Archives.

1

My origins and significant actions*

• Ancestors, childhood, and family life in New York City

• Temporary move to California

• High school classmate Stanley Milgram: Milgram’s obedience experiments and his career

• Stanford Prison Experiment (looking ahead)

• Undergraduate education

• Social activism

Let’s go back to your beginnings and talk a little bit about your ancestors and where you grew up.

My origins start in two towns in Sicily. One, Cammarata, is near Palermo; the other one is Agira, which is near Catania. The Agira part is my maternal grandparents and the Cammarata part is my paternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather is Filippo Zimbardo; his wife was Vera Zimbardo. They were the parents of George Zimbardo, my father. My mother Margaret Zimbardo’s family came from the other side of the island. Her maiden name was Margaret Bisicchia and her father was a shoemaker. My other grandfather, Philip, who I’m named after, was a barber. They came from humble origins, no education. They migrated to America in the big Sicilian migration around the turn of the century. I am second generation; my parents were born here.

I grew up in a part of New York City called the South Bronx. It was a ghetto, like a third-world country. But we didn’t know that. For us it was lovely. I say I grew up in poverty because my father was often out of work; he didn’t particularly like to work. His trade was a barber. He didn’t like to wait on people. He liked people to wait on him because he was the first male after seven older female sisters. He was always treated as the little prince. I remember years later, when he was a much older man, his sisters would still treat him like a charming little boy. He had incredible talents: He had perfect pitch. He had a great ear for music. He could hear a song and then within thirty minutes be playing it. He played all string instruments—piano, mandolin, really great violin, and guitar. He could sing and dance. He was the life of the party, always.

Growing Up: from East Coast to West Coast, and Back

Unfortunately, he got married too young and he and my mother had four children a year and a half apart. That’s not good, having lots of little kids. I was born March 23, 1933, so in the Depression. When he was out of work, we were on home relief, which meant you got a monthly check, and you got free food if you went to a food bank, and you got free clothing if you went to a special clothing store. You know, so things were free. It was not survival, just humiliating, because I still remember after all these years going to a big factory where you got clothes.

In those days, boys would start off wearing short pants till you were about seven, eight, nine, and then you switched to knickers, which don’t exist anymore, till you were maybe ten, twelve, and then you got your first pair of long pants. There were two kinds of knickers, one kind had fine stripes and the other kind had broad stripes. The problem with the kind with broad stripes is that when you walked, it would make noise, and everybody would laugh at you. At the store, I’m looking through the pile trying not to find those ugly ones—they looked the same to me. While I’m looking, this man comes over and says, “Beggars can’t be choosers. Take anything and get out.” I remember, in tears, saying, “I’m not a beggar. And this is your job. You’re getting paid not to be rude,” or something. That, again, is one of the parts of poverty that poor people don’t talk about. Just the humiliation of being poor. Then the war came, and my father got interested in electronics, and with no background, no training, opened a little radio store with somebody who was trained and began to make money.

In 1947 my father built a television set from a wiring diagram, having apprenticed himself to a Puerto Rican radio store man who had a store below our apartment at 1005 East 151^st Street. I still remember. I mean, television was invented in 1946, a year before. It was a small eight-inch screen, but we watched the World Series. It was between the Yankees and the Dodgers. I remember charging fifty cents for kids to come and watch. It was really wonderful. The only problem, again, is that my father doesn’t like to work. I said, “Dad, here’s a bonanza. You know how to do it. We’ll all help you. We can make another one. Everybody wants to buy one.” He said, “No, no. I made one. That was the challenge. Sorry, I’m not interested.”

That was the sad thing. Then I realized the only way out of poverty was through education. I realized that very, very young. I loved school. School was orderly, it was clean, neat; there was no chaos. Poverty was left behind. The teachers in those days were really admirable. They were really heroic. They would come into these poor neighborhoods—sometimes they were dangerous—and would teach us not only the subject matter, but really lessons in life, the importance of sanitation, personal cleanliness. I still remember how to set a table. At the time I realized this was something really special and appreciated it.

I was a really good student and went from PS 25 where I started to PS 52, which was junior high school, all boys. Then when I graduated there, I went to Stuyvesant High School for one term because I had been with all boys in junior high and I said, “Enough. Enough with being with guys.” Stuyvesant High School was amazing. I mean, it was really so high level. But I switched to James Monroe High School in the Bronx because there were lots of lovely girls and I had some friends going there. Then at the end of 1947/1948, my family moved to North Hollywood, California. My father had these seven sisters and two younger brothers. They were all living there, and they put pressure on him to come so the family would be together. So we went. We flew out on a DC-3, one of these tiny planes. Somebody said it was in a Clark Gable/Carole Lombard film. It was extraordinarily expensive.

It took twenty-four hours to go from LaGuardia Airport to Burbank and make like three or four stops, but it was exciting for us kids. Unfortunately, in 1948 there was a big depression in Hollywood, California. The movie industry was concerned that video would take over. A lot of the defense companies were losing their government contracts. So we got out there and there was no work (laughter) for my father. We ended up being even poorer than we were in New York, only now we were poor in a beautiful environment.

It was really difficult living there. But it was so beautiful. It was really amazing, coming from the Bronx where everything is concrete and steel and asphalt. When I give lectures I always show pictures of what the playground was like—not only what the houses were like around the playground. The playground was just asphalt. On the weekends you had to climb over a fence to play in it because they closed the playground. Imagine. There was no green, no grass, no flowers, and no trees. I had to walk seven blocks to St. Mary’s Park at least once a year because when we had a project, like an Indian village, I knew the only birch tree in the South Bronx was in St. Mary’s Park. I’d go and I cut a little piece of birch bark to make a little birch bark canoe. I think I still have it after all these years. Then you go to North Hollywood and there were trees and flowers everywhere.

What seemed like paradise turned out to be a nightmare for me personally. I had always been a really popular kid. I had worked at being popular. When I say popular, I was always the president, the vice president, captain, vice-captain of everything, of sports teams, of class teams.

Why was that?

This is going to take me all the way back again. When I was five and a half years old, I developed double pneumonia and whooping cough. Whooping cough is a contagious disease. This was November 1938. In those days, there was a lot of contagious disease in the ghettos. People lived very close together, conditions were very toxic, and the air was toxic—everything that could be wrong, was. That’s true in any ghetto around the world. When I developed pneumonia, I was five and a half. There was a hospital in Manhattan called Willard Parker Hospital for children with contagious diseases. This is for all the children in New York, and it was from age two to upper teenagers, who were required by the state to be put in these hospitals until they were healthy, disease free.

I was there six months, from November 1938 till April 1939. The problem was that there was no medication. Penicillin had not been invented, nor sulfa drugs.¹ That means that for all these children who had diphtheria, scarlet fever, polio, and you name it, there was no treatment. You just lay in bed all the time. They didn’t even have the concept of dynamic exercise—lying in bed stretching, doing things—so you just lay there. Actually, you lay there, and you got worse. Your muscles atrophied. Kids were dying. I can still remember a vision of long rooms with beds side by side as far as you could see.

Doctors would come around, pick up your chart, sometimes say, “How are you feeling?” And you’d say, “Oh, terrible.” And they would make a checkmark. Nurses would come around and the only thing they would do is take your temperature. What would happen is, you wake up in the morning and you say, “Nurse, where’s Billy?”

“Oh. He went home,” she would say.

“Why didn’t he say goodbye?”

“Well, he was in a hurry.”

The next day Mary’s bed is empty. Suddenly you realized this was a conspiracy of denial, that kids were dying all the time, as you would expect, and the nurses couldn’t say they died and so they would say they went home. The terrible thing was, we kids had to join in that conspiracy because we all wanted to go home, but we didn’t want to go home that way. What made a horrible situation worse was there was no radio, no television. There was no mail from parents. There were no phone calls. Poor people didn’t have a phone in their home anyway. Visiting hours were one hour a week on Sunday, which for a kid waiting a whole week is unimaginable. Then when Sunday came, my parents came with all the kids and they were behind a big glass wall. They pushed my bed against the wall. You have a phone and you’re talking back and forth.

Of course, everybody’s crying. I’m crying to be with them, they’re crying probably looking at how terrible I looked. I was really pale. With double pneumonia and whooping cough, it was hard to eat. It was hard to put anything in your mouth because the combination of those two diseases made it hard to swallow and made it hard to breathe. I was constantly losing weight. So they’d cry and cry. There were four sets of visitors. When the fifth one came, they moved your bed back. Officially the visiting was supposed to be two hours, but it was never more than one hour.

It was winter, and my mother was pregnant. I had two brothers, Donald and George, each a year and a half younger. My mother was pregnant with my soon-to-be sister, Vera. George had braces on one leg. He had polio but not a contagious version. Winters used to be really tough in New York in those days, lots of snow. To go from our house in the Bronx to the train station was about a six-block walk. The train took probably a half an hour. Then it was a five or six-block walk from the train station to the East River Drive where the hospital was. When it snowed my mother couldn’t come. Obviously, we didn’t have a car. So you waited all week, and nobody showed up, and they couldn’t call to say they’re not coming. It was incredibly depressing.

How did you deal with that as a child?

I dealt with it the way a grownup would. That’s the story. I decided I couldn’t depend on the doctors, I couldn’t depend on my parents, I couldn’t depend on anyone, so I was going to have to depend on me and God. I became very religious, and I would pray every morning. “Bless me, Father. I’m struggling. I want to live. I want to be healthy, strong, brave, smart, and I need your help.” You know, “I’ll be a good boy when I get out,” and so forth. “Make me well as soon as possible.” Then during the day, I would make little prayers.

My family was not religious. My parents never went to church. They encouraged me to take the younger brothers to church. Then every morning kids were dying; I realized God wouldn’t kill little kids. So when the lights went out, I assumed the devil was coming to make the selection. What is the reasonable strategy here? At night I prayed to the devil not to take me. I still feel guilty because I said, “Look. There are a lot of kids here.” (laughter) “They’re all really nice kids, but if you got to take somebody, don’t take me.” (laughter) Then I’d put myself under the sheets and go to sleep.

I realized later that I was practicing self-hypnosis, because I would wake up and it was morning, I wouldn’t have dreams or anything. That self-induced hypnosis I later perfected. I actually was trained in Manhattan at the Morton Prince Clinic of Hypnotherapy when I was teaching at New York University (NYU). I went on to do lots of research using hypnosis. When I was at Stanford University I always had a big class on hypnotizability, and I would do lots of demonstrations as well as teach kids how to use hypnosis for positive outcomes.

I became very self-reliant. But when I got out of the hospital, I’m back in this old neighborhood with all these gang kids, and now I’m this really skinny, sickly kid. I get home and I’m really happy to be home. I go down in the street and kids start yelling and cursing at me and chasing me. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but what they were yelling was that I was a “Dirty Jew Bastard!” I just kept running and running faster than my attackers.

I ended up being a good runner. (laughter) Ultimately, I was the captain of the track team in high school and at Brooklyn College. Our relay team, of which I was the anchor, actually set a record at Brooklyn College for the time. It wasn’t until my mother asked the janitor’s son, an African American boy, Charlie Glassford—I still remember after all these years, I’m seven years old I think, something like that—to take me to church on Sunday. Charlie Glassford said to my mother, “I can’t take him to church. He’s a Jew.”

My mother said, “No. We’re Catholic.”

He said, “Oh, my God. We’ve been beating him up because he was a Jew.”

Is that because they thought you looked Jewish?

Yes. Because I was skinny, had blue eyes and a big nose. The other kids there were from a wide variety of ethnic groups. It fit their image. They’re terrible, these prejudices. I fit the image, for these little kids—I’m talking kids who are like maybe seven to ten years old, living on our street, on the east side of 51^st Street.

My mother said, “No. He’s Catholic.”

He said, “Oh, my God. Okay. We’re really sorry.”

Then they said, “Okay, we’ll take him into our gang.” But to get into the gang there was a ritual. You had to fistfight the previous kid who got into the gang until one of you got a bloody nose or quit. Then you had to steal—they put you through a store window—groceries or fruit from a fruit store. You had to climb up a tree. They took your sneakers and threw them up in the tree. You had to climb up the tree and take them down. Lastly, you had to go underneath the woman’s lingerie shop, underneath the building, where there was a railing that you could look up from below, and you had to tell them what you saw looking up at women’s bottoms. Of course, you couldn’t see anything. It was black, all dark. Here’s a primitive kids’ ritual. I mean, it’s nowhere near what gangs do subsequently.

I got into the gang, but still I was skinny and weak. The main thing they did was play stickball in the street. Stickball was just a broomstick and a Spaldeen rubber ball, and you didn’t need gloves or anything. Then as you got a little older, they began to play softball, but you couldn’t play that in the street. The other reason you could play in the streets in those days was that nobody had cars. The street was really where kids lived. What was exciting about it, which doesn’t exist anymore, is there were always kids in the street except when it was school time.

As soon as you came home from school, you would run and do your homework and then come down and play. There were sea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The book
• Authors
• About the book
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Shari Young Kuchenbecker
• Introduction
• 1. My origins and significant actions
• 2. Graduate training, early teaching, research, and social activism
• 3. The joys of joining the Stanford Faculty, new research, teaching and publishing
• 4. Exploring a range of new, original research topics
• 5. New ideas and achievements in a strange American era
• 6. My new visions become action programs
• 7. Endnotes, looking back, hoping for a pride-filled future
• Afterword by Mauro Cozzolino
• APPENDIX
• Photo Gallery