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World-famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University gave a lecture on Friday at the Freddy Wood theatre to a packed house of a thousand students. His talk, titled “A Journey from Evil to Heroism,” discussed his research on circumstances that can lead good people to do evil things, but also how ordinary people can perform heroic acts.

Zimbardo began his talk by asking, “How can we begin to understand what makes good people turn evil?” His early research aimed to refute the idea of a fixed line between good and evil within individuals. “I wanted to entertain the possibility that the line is permeable, that it’s not fixed, and that good people can be lured across the line,” he said. “The positive side of it is that people who were bad at one time can be brought back, can be rehabilitated.”

Zimbardo is most well-known for his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. He assigned college participants to either the roles of guards or prisoners. The experiment got out of hand, and was shut down after six days after participants began exhibiting violent behaviour and emotional trauma. Zimbardo realized that it wasn’t that the “guards” were inherently bad people, but that the situation they were in caused them to behave in a malicious way. “We knew we only had good apples. We went to great lengths to find the most healthy college students,” he said. “I knew I put them in a bad barrel—the simulated prison environment.”

Zimbardo juxtaposed the themes of evil and good, ending his talk by discussing how ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Zimbardo described his efforts in promoting studies on heroism. He discussed his work with the Heroic Imagination Project, non-profit organization that aims to promote heroism through research and education. He showed the audience images of Canadian heroes. The images, which included Laura Secord, Nellie McClung and Romeo Dallaire, conveyed to the audience that these were ordinary people who chose to act at the right moment.

The lecture was part of the Grauer Memorial Lectures program, established in honour of the late A.E. Grauer, former chancellor of UBC.

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