American psychologist Prof. Philip G. Zimbardo received the highest award of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The most significant award of the Czech Academy of Sciences – the honorary medal De scientia et humanitate optime meritis – was presented to Prof. Philip Zimbard by President of the CAS Prof. Jiří Drahoš. The psychologist Philip Zimbardo is famous particularly for his so-called Stanford prison experiment and also his authorship of many books. The most famous is Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, which was published last year in the CR by the Publishing House Academia.

At a festive ceremony at the headquarters of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague on 18 September, Prof. Drahoš acknowledged his merits in the development of global psychology and science as well as his cooperation with the Czech scientific community. “I was first here in 1969 and am glad to cooperate with Czech experts to this day,” confirmed Prof. Zimbardo.

Philip Zimbardo achieved pioneering results in the resolution of burning issues, particularly non/violence among people. His professionalism, integrity and humanism is a model for his students and colleagues and he embodies the ideals of the award of De scientia et humanitate optime meritis. This award is granted to important domestic and foreign personalities, who have contributed to the advancement of science, education and culture.

Zimbardo became famous as the author of the experiment, Stanford Prison Study; he also studied the effects of de-individualization, the mechanisms of shyness and time perspectives. He is the author of more than 400 specialized articles and books and the video series Discovering Psychology. According to the Web of Science, his h-index value is 29 and more than 3,500 works cite him.

He has experimentally proved the strong influence of the situation on human behaviour and shown that even good people can be drawn to bad behaviour. Especially in the second phase of his career, he therefore devoted himself to the support of pro-social activities, education to nonconformity and heroism (his Heroic Imagination Project was inspired by Václav Havel). He is closely tied to the Czech Republic and Europe where also his ethnic roots lie. He has been connected with Czech psychology since the 1960s, he revived that contact after 1989 and established a friendship with Václav Havel (he won the Vize 97 Award, attended the Fóra 2000), inspired the gallery DOX to a large exposition on the Lucifer Effect. He lectured and appeared in the media in the CR. Since the 1990s, he has cooperated also with the Institute of Psychology of the CAS (a joint publication on the method of Time Perspective Inventory). The anthology of Zimbardo’s texts Power and Evil (Vize 97, 2005) and the already mentioned Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Academia, 2014) are perhaps known by Czech readers.