CSUN funds famed psychologist

March 5, 2009 by Haley Etchison 

With the help of the Psi Chi psychology honor society and CSUN, one of psychology’s most famous faces will captivate another audience next month.

Philip Zimbardo, conductor of the famous Stanford prison experiment will be speaking at UNLV April 15. Zimbardo waved his usual speaking fee and CSUN funded Psi Chi the $8,000 needed to put on the event.

College of sciences Sen. Victor Barragan, a biochemistry and psychology dual major and one of the event’s supporters commended the work of Psi Chi and reminded students, “This is going to be a big event.”

“Zimbardo is going to draw a huge crowd, said psychology student Dmitriy Kazakov. “We know that because he is an incredible speaker.

“It’s national recognition for Psi Chi [and] the department of psychology and it looks great for the university as a whole,” said Psi Chi member Erik Ringdahl. “We’re hoping that a great deal of students can come and also we’re opening up the invitation to universities and colleges around our area.”

Kazakov explained, “He is going to talk about the journey from evil to heroism – basically a recap of all his work [including] his prison study… and his new line of research in heroism.”

Psychology major Sally Barney explained Zimbardo’s famous experiment.

“The Stanford prison experiment is probably his most popular and what students will hear about in their general classes,” she said. “He set up a mock prison environment and randomly selected people from the community and put them as either guard or prisoners.”

Barney said the experiment was cut short when participants began attacking each other. There were uprisings among prisoners and the guards started abusing inmates.

Ringdahl outlined some of Zimbardo’s latest accomplishments. “He recently published the book ‘The Lucifer Effect’ where he talks about [the prison] study,” he said. “He has gone off this study for quite a long time and travelled across the world reporting his findings.”

According to Ringdahl, Zimbardo’s latest findings compare the actions of authority figures in the armed forces serving in the War on Terror to the behavior of the guards in his original experiment.

The time and location of Zimbardo’s appearance on April 15 have yet to be determined.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier edition of this article incorrectly labeled Victor Baragan as a psychology minor. This was incorrect. Barragan is a biochemistry and psychology dual major. We regret this error.]