What makes ordinary people do evil things? It was a question that long fascinated the psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who died in October. Zimbardo was best known for the controversial Stanford prison experiment, in which he created a simulated prison in the basement of a university building and recruited volunteers to act as prisoners and guards. This week, we explore how Zimbardo came to create one of psychology's most notorious experiments – and inadvertently became the poster child for the human weaknesses he was trying to study. We're bringing Hidden Brain to the stage in San Francisco and Seattle in February 2025! Join our host Shankar Vedantam as he shares seven key insights from his first decade hosting the show. Click here for more info and tickets.
Full Episode
Hey there, Shankar here with a quick note before we start today's show. I'm bringing Hidden Brain to the stage in San Francisco and Seattle in February 2025. I'll share seven psychological insights from the last decade of hosting Hidden Brain. Each insight has made my life better, and I think it will do the same for you. Please join me for an evening of science and storytelling.
More information and a link to tickets is at hiddenbrain.org slash tour. That's hiddenbrain.org slash t-o-u-r. All attendees receive one year's complimentary membership to the meditation and sleep app Calm. Hope to see you there.
Again, go to hiddenbrain.org slash tour. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
The biblical King Solomon is said to have constructed a religious edifice nearly 3,000 years ago. Accounts of the Temple of Solomon, largely drawn from the Hebrew Bible, say that Solomon placed an object of incalculable value within a windowless room of the temple. It was the Ark of the Covenant, a wooden chest decorated with gold,
Inside it were tablets, given to Moses by God, inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Remnants or artifacts from the temple have never been found. About 300 years ago, the Temple of Solomon became a subject of intense interest to a gifted mathematician in England. Isaac Newton came to believe that biblical accounts of the temple contained messages and clues that could be mathematically decoded.
He also felt the temple's architecture contained geometrical secrets and a blueprint of human history. Based on his calculations and deductions, he predicted a major event in the 21st century, one that some people took to mean the end of the world as we know it.
Even as he dabbled in what would now be considered the occult, Isaac Newton also famously revolutionized our understanding of the physical world. He came up with laws of physics that are still taught in high schools today. His contributions to mathematics, especially the science of calculus, are used on a daily basis in fields as diverse as space travel and epidemiology.
How did the scientist who helped us understand the law of gravity come to believe he had special powers to decode scripture? Why did one of the most influential mathematicians in history spend so many years trying to turn base metals into gold? It's easy to say Isaac Newton was being brilliant when he was inventing calculus and foolish when he dabbled in the occult.
The truth was that Isaac Newton saw both of these as forms of exploration. It's just that we know that one turned out to be right and the other turned out to be wrong. Today, we're going to tell you the story of another explorer. He was a psychologist who wanted to answer big questions.
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