My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
Interpretation
Early life experiences shape one's career and perspectives, especially in understanding social psychology.
Philip Zimbardo reflects on how his challenging upbringing in the South Bronx and his family background molded him into a social psychologist. His unique journey from poverty to achieving educational milestones highlights the impact of environment and determination in pursuing a career that helps understand societal behaviors.
In practice
This quote can be used during a graduation speech to inspire students from underprivileged backgrounds.
Before I knew that a man could kill a man, because it happens all the time. Now I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth: that is what I have Learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world.
Boys' brains are being digitally rewired for change, novelty, excitement and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, interactively passive.
Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.
Time perspective is one of the most powerful influences on all of human behavior. We're trying to show how people become biased to being exclusively past-, present- or future-oriented.
Many cults start off with high ideals that get corrupted by leaders or their board of advisors who become power-hungry and dominate and control members' lives. No group with high ideals starts off as a 'cult'; they become one when their errant ways are exposed.
Heroes are Ordinary People whose social action is Extra-Ordinary/ who ACT when others are passive, who give up EGO-centrism for SOCIO-centrism.
Most people won't realise that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
He continues to teach because it provides him with a livelihood; also because it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.
It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.
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