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.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

After doing psychology for half a century, my passion for all of it is greater than ever.

The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.

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

We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil.

To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant — because you're always going against the conformity of the group.