Philip Zimbardo, One of the Original Authors of ‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,’ Passes Away

The Closing Remarks of Our Eminent Mental Health Panel, Reflecting His Influence

On October 14, 2024, the world lost Dr. Philip Zimbardo, renowned psychologist and principal investigator of “the Stanford prison experiment,” whose research revolutionized our thinking on the influence of social situations on people’s behavior.

Decades before he contributed to the first edition of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, he had great influence on my own studies of violence prevention.  I cited him in every course I taught.  He featured prominently in my Yale College global health studies class, “Causes and Cures of Violence,” which later became an internationally-acclaimed textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.  He is one of the most revered scholars of psychology ever to have lived—a legend of our time—whose contributions will reverberate for decades to come.

Instead of explaining his work myself, allow me to quote his words, published in 2021 with his writing partner (and coauthor for The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump), Rosemary Sword:

[What] has become known as the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) drove me to extensively pursue the question: Why do good people do evil things?  After three decades of research on this subject, I recorded my findings in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil….

The Experiment in a Nutshell

In August 1971, I led a team of researchers at Stanford University to determine the psychological effects of being a guard or a prisoner….  In the study, 24 normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison located in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department building.  But the guards quickly became so brutal, and I had become so caught up in my role as Superintendent, that I shut down the experiment after only six days.

Challenging the Truth

There seem to be powerful silent barriers to dealing with new truths emanating from psychological laboratories and field experiments that tell us things about how the mind works, which challenge our basic assumptions.  We want to believe our decisions are wisely informed, that our actions are rational, that our personal conscience buffers us against tyrannical authorities.  Moreover, we want to believe in the dominating influence of our good character despite social circumstances.  Yes, those personal beliefs are sometimes true, but often they are not….

Denial and Finger Pointing

When we discover two or three ordinary American citizens administered extreme electric shocks to an innocent victim on the relentless commands of a heartless authority, we say, “no way, not me.”  Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority research has been in the public arena for decades, yet we ignore its message of the power of unjust authority in undercutting our moral conscience.  Similarly, the SPE research made vivid the power of hostile situational forces in overwhelming dispositional tendencies toward compassion and human dignity….

In 2004, people around the world witnessed online photos of horrific actions of American Military Police guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison against prisoners in their charge.  It was portrayed as the work of a “few bad apples” according to military brass and Bush administration spokespeople.  I publicly challenged this traditional focus on individual dispositions by portraying American servicemen as good apples that were forced to operate in a Bad Barrel (the Situation) created by Bad Barrel Makers (the System)….

The January 6, 2021 insurrection is a recent example of some Good Apples being corrupted by a Bad Barrel.  In this case, the Bad Barrel is the insidiousness of fascism led by the former president and other fraudulent politicians as well as media personalities.  These “leaders” have been generously dumping poison in the Barrel and over the Apples with lies that feed the Apples’ deepest fears….

Heroic Imagination

[My] new mission in life has been to empower everyone to wisely resist negative situational forces and evil by becoming Everyday Heroes in Training….

Indeed, he has demonstrated in myriad ways how we might rise above social pressures—even “Trump Contagion”!—to act on our conscience.  His influence will be felt in our major National Press Club Conference, “The More Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,” not to mention his participation as panelist for our 2019 National Press Club Conference, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,” which C-Span covered in full.  Although unable to be a panelist this time because of illness, Sword kindly notes: “it brings me great pride to share that the final book Phil and I contributed to was released on September 27, 2024 and is titled The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 40 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Warn Anew.”  To the very end, he has added immensely to the good of humanity.

The closing remarks of the Mental Health Panel, in response to audience questions, are recorded here:

The videos of full speeches from the Conference are here. The Conference summary video is here.  The book that was released with the Conference is here.  The Conference website will have regular updates.  Please continue to support our getting out our critical message from the Conference, for, as our gathering revealed, we may not survive another dangerously unfit presidency in this very dangerous world!