I first met with Dr. Zimbardo in Shanghai in 2016.
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I was a big fan of him as the first psychology textbook I read was Psychology and Life 15th Edition, written by Dr. Z.
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At that time, Dr. Zimbardo was traveling to Beijing and Shanghai for his presentation on Heroic Imagination Project.
During the summer of 2017, I visited Stanford University to attend a summer session, where I studied introduction to neuroscience and introduction to statistics.
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I visited the "Site of the Stanford Prison Experiment" at the basement of Psychology Department, which was just a normal corridor.
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The office doors were replaced with bars, and the rooms were turned into cells during the experiment. Also, the closet on the left used to be "The Hole" for "prisoners."
In order to assist Dr. Zimbardo with his online presentation on Zhihu, a Chinese media, I went to San Francisco and visited him again. I was really honored to have the opportunity to discuss psychology with him and stay in the room where he used to write the first version of Psychology and Life for one night.
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He and his wife, Dr. Christina Maslach, kindly invited me to have Japanese sushi with them at Yoshi's Oakland. It was a very interesting restaurant with both sushi and jazz performances! We enjoyed our meal and also enjoyed the wonderful performance by The Tommy Igoe Bid Band. (He knew I love Jazz!)
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It was a wonderful night!
After finishing the online presentation on the second day morning, I needed to leave. And Dr. Zimbardo kindly made me a toast and a cup of green tea for my breakfast! I still remember, it was a green cup with Psychology and Life on it.
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He gave me his new textbook Psychology - Core Concepts and his most popular book The Lucifer Effect as gifts to me (with his sign!). And I finished reading The Lucifer Effect during the summer session. It was a great book on the details of SPE and the implications and insights that we can draw from this contentious experiment.
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Now, Dr. Zimbardo is studying heroism instead of evil. Creating the Heroic Imagination Project, he wants to educate people to overcome those notorious social psychology effects (e.g. conformity, diffusion of responsibility) and stand up to become every heroes. If interested, please press the picture below:
