Phil Zimbardo died on October 14. His obituary is online.
One of his lesser professional accomplishments came in 2003 when that year’s Ig Nobel Prize in psychology was awarded to Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo, for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.” That study was published in Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493.
The photo you see here shows Phil at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University, bursting through the sacred curtain. Nobel laureate Rich Roberts is at right, preparing to hand Phil the Ig Nobel Prize. Human curtain rod Tom Ulrich is in the photo, assisting the presentation.
Zimbardo’s Famous Obedience Experiment
Phil was a psychology professor at Stanford University. He was perhaps most famous for what became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, which explored people’s willingness to obey unseemly commands from authority figures.
The Double Curiosity of Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s Famous Experiments and also Ig Nobel Honors
It is a doubly curious thing that one of his high school classmates, Stanley Milgram, also became famous for doing a psychology experiment exploring that same general question (which many people found disturbing, for many reasons) — and also won an Ig Nobel Prize in psychology for an unrelated experiment.
In 2023 MIlgram (posthumously) and two of his former students were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward. They documented that experiment in the study “Note on the Drawing Power of Crowds of Different Size,” Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 13, no. 2, 1969, pp. 79-82.