APA News Release

Date: December 1, 2000

Contact: Pam Willenz
Public Affairs Office
(202) 336-5707

For Immediate Release

Washington - Well-known psychologist Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., professor at Stanford University has been elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA) for 2002.

Dr. Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford for over 30 years, is known for his work on the Stanford prison experiment which demonstrated the power of social situations through a mock prison experiment with normal, healthy college students. He has authored over 200 professional articles, chapters, and books representing his broad and varied interests in topics ranging from exploratory and sexual behavior in rats to persuasion, dissonance, hypnosis, cults, shyness, time perspective, deindividuation, prisons, and madness.

He has received numerous awards for his writings, teachings and research. The most recent of these awards include the Phi Beta Kappa Distinguished Teaching Award for Northern California (1998), the Robert Daniels Teaching Excellence Award, APA Division 2, Society for the Teaching of Psychology Award (1999) and an APA Presidential Citation for Outstanding contributions to psychology for the Discovery Psychology video series (1994).

As APA president, Dr. Zimbardo says he will offer his many years of service in research, practice and teaching to provide creative approaches to the changing field of psychology. "I look forward to making APA more vibrant and responsive to the needs of its many constituencies and to be more open to young psychologists and to diverse perspectives. Furthermore, I would like to increase the mutual respect of psychologists in the various areas, like practice, education, science and the public interest. Other goals of mine are to make our research and clinical contributions to society more highly visible, to increase the positive image of psychology in the media and to make us proud to be psychologists, in one of the most challenging and dynamic of all professions."

Philip Zimbardo grew up in the South Bronx ghetto of New York City in a Sicilian-American family. He learned early on that people are our most valuable resource and education is the key to escaping poverty, which is what fueled his desire to become a psychologist-educator.

He went to Monroe High School with classmate, Stanley Milgram, Ph.D., who also became a social psychologist, then to Brooklyn College (where he published his first research article on race relations), and to Yale where he completed his Ph.D. Zimbardo has been on the faculty at Yale, NYU, Columbia, and now Stanford. Among his honorary degrees are those from Aristotle University, and the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology-in clinical psychology.

He has taught introductory psychology for the past four decades, as well as courses at all levels of the curriculum. He regularly trains his students to become some of psychology's most effective teachers through his innovative practicums in teaching. Zimbardo has also had a major impact on psychology through his popular textbooks, notably Psychology and Life, in its 15^th edition, honored recently for its excellence and longevity.

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