Philip Zimbardo interview
In summer 2018, Nantes was selected to host the 4th International Conference in Time Perspective (ICTP). Time has a powerful influence on our feelings and actions, however, we are unaware of the effect of time in our lives. Time perception is a main concept in social science and for the last 6 years, many scientists from different disciplines decided to get together in order to better understand the psychological dimension in human tempo.
The most representative psychologist in time perspective studies is probably Philip Zimbardo, who became known in 1971 after the Stanford prison experiment. I had the honor to meet him in the last ICTP, and I would like to share with you their thoughts.
Phil is a distinguished psychologist who published several hundred professional articles and fifty books. A professor emeritus at Stanford University, Zimbardo has spent nearly 50 years teaching and studying psychology. His areas of focus include time perspective, shyness, evil and madness.
1/ Would you lead the prison experiment today? Why?
YES indeed, I would redo the Stanford Prison Experiment, SPE, with one or two modifications.
My reasoning is:
The SPE has proved to be a unique and enduring contribution to psychology for nearly 50 years, cited both by scholars and ordinary public around the world.
It is the most powerful demonstration of situational forces dominating individual dispositions. Most research in psychology lasts only a single hour, typically squeezed into student’s academic curricula. In contrast, this study endured for 24 hours per day for six full days, prisoners is living in their cells 24/7, and guards working eight hour shifts. So it was possible to observe the gradual transformation– hour after hour day by day– of many prisoners and many guards to becoming the role they were playing. Most of the guards over time became creative and evil often behaving sadistically in dominating and abusing their prisoners– knowing that it was only an experiment in a psychology basement and also because of the random assignment to the two conditions, they could have easily been the prisoners being dominated. Similarly, a number of the prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns every day because of this sense of powerlessness and of being dehumanized in that setting.
In redoing the study, which of course is no longer possible since is been judged unethical by human subjects research committees, I would make two changes: I would be only the principal investigator/researcher to have someone else play the role of superintendent of the SPE. In the original study I play both roles and at times those roles were in conflict. It would also be good to have an external observer with the power to terminate the experiment whenever that authority felt the research was harming the participants.
2/ Do you often think of what you should have done differently on your life?
The simple answer to your question is “no.” The reason behind that answer is I am really please with the direction my life has taken and in the success that I have achieved– coming from having grown up in poverty, in a ghetto in the South Bronx, New York City, with uneducated Sicilian parents, and with no emphasis on education, rather children should go to work as early as is legally possible. So I’d like to argue that I have succeeded life “on my own” without any external support family, only by teachers who model for me the importance of a life centered around educating the mind.
2.1/ How much time of your day you allocate to these thoughts?
NONE!
3/ What do you think about the affirmation: « whatever will be will be »?
Actually I hate that affirmation, because it presents a passive orientation to life that I challenge, focusing instead on what must be done now to create an ideal tomorrow, by hard work, engaging support of others, and having a vision of ideal goals to be achieved.
4/ What factors would lead persons to attribute different time perception to the same experience?
Time perspective is a very special individual difference variable, that I identified as measurable with the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, ZTPI, shown to be a valid and reliable measure of how people partition the flow of their experiences into various time zones. In my book, The Time Paradox, I describe my belief that time perspective is the most powerful influence on all of our action-based decisions, yet most of us are unaware of that mental process. My goal in recent years has been to make people aware of how much the behavior is controlled by their time perspective, and what they can do to be in better command of their temporal based decisions. I argue that most people tend to overuse some time Zones while underusing others, and have been doing so for much of their lives others.
Recently, I have made evident that much research supports the view that developing a balanced time perspective, BTP, has many advantages; personally socially, academically and also in business. A balance time perspective has the following characteristics: High on past positive dimension/ low on past negative; moderate on present hedonism/ but low on present fatalism; moderately high on future orientation (but not too high to promote becoming a workaholic), but low on future negative or the transcendental future time zone.
5/ During your journey in Nantes, last summer, how did you perceive time?
Because I was aware that this experience would last only a few days, I tried to make it a more present hedonistic experience than I would ordinarily. That means I tried to be a socio-centric as I could be, working hard to meet and enjoy new people, new experiences, good food, good wine, good entertainment, and as much sightseeing as possible of the unique features of this extraordinary city.
6/ How did you experience this conference (the ICTP)?
I enjoyed the conference very much, learned a lot, shared a lot of ideas and feelings, and reconnected with former colleagues, while enjoying meeting new ones.
This conference was perhaps more intellectual than earlier ones, that is more lectures and workshops, and fewer entertaining aspects of time perspective that we have had in the past.
In one sense, I’m the “Godfather” of the international time perspective conferences, in part because everyone is using the ZTPI as our common currency among mostly younger psychologists and educators and others.
This was the fourth ICTP conference that I attended: the first was held at the University in Coimbra, Portugal— organized brilliantly by two graduate students. It included more downtime, fun time, music and dance time than is typical of any conference. The second conference was in Warsaw, Poland again at the University, but perhaps it has been the most academically focused conference of all. Our third conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark and was the most unusual, being held in a large public “space” rather than university auditoriums.
The organizers encouraged more artists to present and perform, more people from the therapeutic realm of psychology, and also more people from business who are interested in the role and power of time perspective in their domain. So Nantes was our fourth conference that I found enjoyable in many ways, perhaps with a smaller attendance than previous conferences.
To know more:
http://www.timeperspective.net/
https://www.ted.com/speakers/philip_zimbardo
Words I have learned :
workaholic : Addiction au travail
unaware : ignorant, ne pas être au courant
sadistically : sadiquement, de manière sadique
breakdown : rupture, réparation.
Overuse : surutilisation, utilisation excessive, abus
sightseeing : faire du tourisme, visiter, excursions
realm : domaine, sphère