Situational variables can exert powerful influences over human behavior, more so that we recognize or acknowledge.

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

If you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia...

My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.

Human behavior is incredibly pliable, plastic.

The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.