Philip Zimbardo Quotes

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man... it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture.

Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience.

It's not rocket science. It's social science.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.

We humans are really good at forming groups to compete, and then dissolving the groups and reforming them along different lines to compete in a different way.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

I love observing people.

I love people, I love studying people more than history. So whatever situation I see, then I look at, what were the people like, more than history itself.

You can find inspiration for man's behaviour wherever you look.

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

Our aggression is a deep instinct which survives in all kinds of manifestations in modern man.

The Social Sciences will concern themselves with the rationalization of social control... the control of human behavior.

Society becomes how we behave.

The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture.

I went to Macalester in Minnesota to study social psychology, the study of why people do what they do. I was really looking at race, population, gender, and how we psychologically function in a way that affects our societal outcomes around those issues.

The principles and passions of men are always the same and lead to the same result, varying only according to the circumstances in which they are placed.