The level of shyness has gone up dramatically in the last decade. I think shyness is an index of social pathology rather than a pathology of the individual.

The prisoners who had been thought to have organized the escape were disciplined and harassed with more pushups and toilet cleaning. Zimbardo is the co-author of an introductory Psychology textbook entitled Psychology and Life which is used in many American undergraduate psychology courses. The Stanford Prison Experiment participants were actually arrested for crimes which they did not commit while those in the BBC study were just brought to the location by a blacked out car.

He is president of the Heroic Imagination Project. Philip George Zimbardo (born March 23 1933) is a psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University.