“We have erred in making heroes mythical creatures. Most heroic acts are acts by ordinary people...The way to oppose evil is planting this heroic imagination in little kids and saying... ‘You are going to have the chance, once in your lifetime, to do a heroic act on behalf of other people. When the one time comes...if you don’t take that opportunity, it may never come again.’”

Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD, Stanford University emeritus psychology professor, on what psychologists can do to counter evil.

“Most early movies depicted therapy as hypnotism; that’s because trying to do a silent film on psychoanalysis is quite a challenge.”

John V. Flowers, PhD, a psychology professor at Chapman University, on the Hollywood portrayal of behavioral medicine.

“You think that articles in the Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology are long? Wait ’til you see your own dissertation.”

Paul Silvia, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, while giving dissertation-writing advice to graduate students.

“There were 60,000 men in a stadium, not watching a football game.”

Neil Chethik, men’s issues author and former columnist, on attending his first men’s rights event in the 1980s.

“In a way, my mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.”

Elyn R. Saks, JD, a law and psychiatry professor at the University of Southern California, on her struggle to overcome schizophrenia.

“No one really talks about the fact that [many famous psychologists] were Jewish. Except Freud, who everyone knows was a self-hating Jew, who did a lot of cocaine and stole his ideas from the Kabbalah—OK, so he had a lot of problems.”

Lewis Z. Schlosser, PhD, a psychology professor at Seton Hall University, on the professional contributions of Jewish psychologists.

“I have been back to New Orleans several times since [Katrina]. The pictures have not changed much.”

Priscilla Dass-Brailsford, EdD, of Lesley University, who has found that that while New Orleans’s tourist areas and tony neighborhoods have bounced back after Hurricane Katrina, poorer areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward remain uninhabitable.

“Rats are not just furry white test tubes. They are social creatures who naturally live in groups in their burrow system.”

Martha McClintock, PhD, of the University of Chicago, who uses rats to study the connection between social isolation and breast cancer.

“The Bobo doll has followed me wherever I go....Last year I was checking into a Washington hotel and the clerk looked at the registration form and said, ‘Aren’t you the psychologist who did the Bobo doll experiment?’ and I said ‘I’m afraid that’s going to be my legacy.’ He said, ‘Hell, that deserves an upgrade!’ There are benefits.”

Psychology luminary Albert Bandura, PhD, on his well-known and controversial 1960s Bobo doll experiments.

“I hope everyone’s feeling sufficiently blitzed so far.”

Brian Ayotte, PhD, chair of the Science Student Council session “Data Blitz,” where 17 graduate students had only two minutes and two slides to explain their research projects.

“This is not the first time in history in which we have been invited to face the possibility of global destruction—the jolting threat of nuclear weapons and global war, for example. But these predicaments, at best, have only called us to question our ways of relating with each other, human to human. The new and interesting thing about the global climate chaos predicament is that it is primarily a call to question our basic ways of relating with nature. The threat does not come from some deranged person with a nuclear bomb, who we then hope to identify and contain while we go about our lives. This threat of global destruction comes from all of us just doing what we are doing now.”

Jeff Beyer, PhD, Carnegie Mellon University, at the session “Harkening Earth’s call or not: Ecological crisis and psychological transformation.”

“I have to say that as an interrogator, I find the quote-unquote ‘interrogation scenes’ in the television show ‘24’ repulsive, absurd, even idiotic. If I am talking to a man who is a bomb maker and a trainer of bomb makers, I am not trying to get him to tell me he was a bomb maker, I want him to tell me the names, nationalities and identities of every student he trained,how he trained them, what types of missions he was training them for, who was funding them, and on and on and on. I cannot do so if I have not established some type of a human relationship with this person.”

“Katherine Sherwood, PhD,” a civilian Department of Defense interrogator, using an assumed name, during a sessionon whether psychologists should be involved in interrogating terrorism detainees.

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