Philip Zimbardo Quotes

Man is a child of his environment.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

I think that you form the way that you act from others around you; it's a kind of an environmental thing.

I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.

We are such a product of our upbringing and environment.

Two things control men's nature, instinct and experience.

There is no escaping from the conclusion that nature prevails enormously over nurture.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling from others.

Genes are not destiny!

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

It's inevitable your environment will influence what you do.

I am obsessed with why people turn out the way they are.

The most important thing to realize is we're not blank slates at birth. We don't start off with nothing in our heads, and then get imprinted entirely by our environment. There's something in our heads on the day we're born, and then we grow up and make choices.

Genes are not simple triggers. No one is hardwired to commit murder or any other crime. Our actions are always the result of stupendously complex gene-environment interactions, and environment is likely to remain the more important influence by far.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

A person's current personality of love, hatred, jealousy, rage or a murderous intent and so on is formed upon genetic elements, education, the environment and a family a person grows in.

We're all influenced by everything unless we're locked in an empty room.

We are all born with a unique genetic blueprint, which lays out the basic characteristics of our personality as well as our physical health and appearance... And yet, we all know that life experiences do change us.

Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake.

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

From spending my decades thinking about behavior and the biological influences on it, I'm convinced by now free will is what we call the biology that hasn't been discovered yet. It's just another way of stating that we're biological organisms determined by the physical laws of the universe.

I think that maybe human beings are conditioned to violence.

We're all a result of our early years and our nature and nurture.

I don't know if people are born with a worldview or if their thinking is a product of their environment.