In this RSA Animate, Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
Philip Zimbardo is internationally recognized as a leading "voice and face of contemporary psychology" through his widely seen PBS-TV series, "Discovering Psychology," his media appearances, best-selling trade books on shyness, and his classic research, The Stanford Prison Experiment.
Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor), having taught previously at Yale, NYU, and Columbia University. He continues teaching graduate students at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and at the Naval Post Graduate School (Monterey). He has been given numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, writer, and service to the profession. Recently, he was awarded the Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition. Among his more than 300 professional publications and 50 books is the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, now in its 18th Edition, and Core Concepts in Psychology in its 5th Edition.
His current research interests continue in the domain of social psychology, with a broad emphasis on everything interesting to study from shyness to time perspective, madness, cults, vandalism, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil. Noted for his personal and professional efforts to actually "give psychology away to the public," Zimbardo has also been a social-political activist, challenging the Government's wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the American Correctional System.
Zimbardo has served as elected President of the Western Psychological Association (twice), President of the American Psychological Association, the Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations (with 1.5 million members), and now is Chair of the Western Psychological Foundation.
He heads a philanthropic foundation in his name to promote education in his ancestral Sicilian towns. Zimbardo adds to his retirement list activities: serving as the new executive director of a center on terrorism, the Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism (CIPERT).
He is also the author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007).
Measured or measurable period. More broadly, it is a continuum that lacks spatial dimensions. Philosophers have sought an understanding of time by focusing on the broad questions of the relation between time and the physical world and the relation between time and consciousness. Those who adopt an absolutist theory of time regard it as a kind of container within which the universe exists and change takes place, and believe that its existence and properties are independent of the physical universe. According to the rival relationist theory, time is nothing over and above change in the physical universe. Largely because of Albert Einstein, it is now held that time cannot be treated in isolation from space (seespace-time). Some argue that Einstein's theories of relativity vindicate relationist theories, others that they vindicate the absolutist theory. The primary issue concerning the relation between time and consciousness is the extent, if any, to which time or aspects of time depend on the existence of conscious beings. Events in time are normally thought of in terms of notions of past, present, and future, which some philosophers treat as mind-dependent; others believe that time is independent of perception and hold that past, present, and future are objective features of the world. See alsogeologic time, Greenwich Mean Time, standard time, Universal Time.
Great art! Just like we are doing by changing the environment we are changing the environment of people drastically - who knows what the hell we will have in a few decades. Amazing, we are killing everything we touch.
Real world doesn't forgive failure? I guess I might as well kill myself after I flunk a quiz, misplay a piano sonata, or run a red light.
Real life is less forgiving than video games. Video games are 100% forgiving. If you fail a video game level, you just reset and get to try again as if nothing at all happened. You lose NOTHING except for the time spent trying to pass the level.
In real life there are often serious consequences for failing. Try being fired because you didn't work hard enough, or you just happened to get unlucky and fail, and then see how forgiving life is to you. You'll have trouble finding a new job, cause people won't want to hire someone who flunked their past job. School is a bit more forgiving, but still, your grades determine what college you get into, and ultimately what job you'll get, and whether you'll be a McDonald's lifer who can barely feed themselves or a successful and rich professional.
The real world is VERY unforgiving when it comes to career related failures.
He's right about one thing, the educational system in the United States is stale, and techno-phobic.
Furthermore, the whole organization of the classroom is wrong, and the students are increasingly unable to tolerate it. They leave the 21st century and enter a 1950s style, top down authority mill.
I run a very relaxed classroom, and still feel stifled by the student's understanding of my power over them.
"You pass or fail us," one of my students pointed out, "so your opinion is the only one that matters."
This makes an open exchange of ideas, and honest debate over controversial opinions, virtually impossible.
I think online education is the only viable option for the future. We have to meet our students on their turf, speak their language, and communicate in their way--social networking, IMs, texts. It's the only way to reach them.
Interesting although it contains far too many flaws and generalizations.
It’s not the first attempt to put people in boxes, it’s a 'nice' and 'clean' idea but it doesn’t work. We are far too complex.
It also reflects a lot of Zimbr's prejudices from his Judaeo-Christian background: present thinking equals empty Hedonism. Why not present positive equals Humanism, modern Epicureanism or Buddhism (Buddhist 'now' and 'here' concept), and present negative equals consumerism, materialism?
Hardly. As an atheist of sorts (I think the whole god/gods/no gods folderol is a waste of time, who cares?) I can assure you that I despise advertising and refuse to buy any product advertised on television. I use generics. I seldom watch television anyway and never when I lived in the US. I have found through personal experience that religious people, including atheists, are far more gullible and liable to self gratification. After all, god (or the gods) will forgive you no matter what you do, so long as drop a shekel or two in the collection plate.
member. 
