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

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.

Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse.

... In contrast to the "banality of evil," which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the "banality of heroism," which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil.

I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.

Prejudice and discrimination have always been a big part of my life. When I was 6, I got beat up and called dirty Jew boy because they thought I looked Jewish.

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.