What the root of evil has to do with a summer in 1971 and the
untapped capacity for good. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo is
best-known for the infamous Stanford Prison Study, one of modern
psychology’s most unsettling experiments on human nature.
(Insights from which are distilled in Zimbardo’s excellent The
Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil — an
absolutely essential text of social psychology, timeless and all
the more timely in today’s global atmosphere of increasing
social and political unrest.) Zimbardo’s latest project,
however, approaches the good/evil dichotomy of the human
condition from precisely the opposite angle. The Heroic
Imagination Project is an inspired nonprofit that aims to
advance everyday heroism though programs designed to harness
people’s inherent, extraordinary and often untapped potential
for good within. At HIP, we believe everyone has the potential
to transform the private virtue of compassion into the civic
virtue of heroic action, and we are dedicated to helping