Professor Phil Zimbardo will bid farewell to Stanford on Wednesday, after 50 years of teaching, with a lecture to Psychology 1 students on the psychology of evil. The lecture is entitled "The Lucifer Effect" after his latest book, and draws from social psychology, including his own Stanford Prison Experiment, to show how horrible abuses such as those witnessed at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are humanly possible. It is a riveting lecture that you don't want to miss.

Seems like a moment ago when I was nervously preparing my first lecture at Yale College back in 1957, as the first graduate student in psychology to be allowed to teach his own introductory psychology course to the "Yale Men."

Somehow, fifty years has gone by teaching that course from small seminars to large lectures with 1,000 students, and it has always been a joy and a challenge to make it work better for each new generation of students. I have been able to keep up my scholarship in this ever-changing discipline by writing the textbook for the course, Psychology and Life, now in its 18th edition.

I shall miss my daily contacts with my students and the many dedicated teaching assistants, but will work at staying young at heart by challenging injustice and inequity wherever it exists, notably now through my new book, which will be the topic of this farewell lecture, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

PHIL ZIMBARDO

The Psychology 1 lecture is open to visitors and takes place on Wednesday, March 7th from 11:00AM to 12:15PM in the basement of the Psychology building, room 40 (basement entrance is behind the building).