Books / Festival of Ideas
Review: Philip Zimbardo, Festival of Ideas
To students of psychology, Philip Zimbardo’s name is a familiar one, attached as it is to the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment in which the research subjects took their roles as prison guards considerably more seriously than expected. No surprise, therefore, that the audience for Zimbardo’s Festival of Ideas talk included a lot of students and the offer of selfies with the great man afterwards.
Zimbardo’s current thesis is that “technology has sabotaged what it means to be male”. This talk at the Watershed was his first attempt to present to an audience the arguments contained in his new book Man (Dis)connected. Because the lecture is still a work in progress, and because of the tight time constraints imposed by a lunchtime talk, Zimbardo spent most of his time focusing heavily on video games and online pornography – much like the teenage boys he was describing.
In summary, his argument – delivered with a torrent of statistics that frequently failed to distinguish between correlation and causality – is that the excessive consumption of video games and online porn is causing boys today to fail academically, socially and sexually through a host of mechanisms, from a failure to develop social skills to porn-induced erectile dysfunction.
is needed now More than ever
The potential solutions to the problems he identified were rushed through in a heavily time-pressured PowerPoint cascade, but did not feature anything earth-shatteringly different from the usual fixes (e.g. take junk food out of school, make school learning as much fun as video games, support the role of fathers).
Although Zimbardo admitted that he is yet another in a long line of ‘alarmists’, he did claim that this ‘crisis’ was different. Unfortunately he did not have the time – or perhaps the impetus – to explain in what way it’s different. But without a convincing argument, cynics can too easily claim that he is simply part of a long tradition of old men who have essentially argued that “modern life is rubbish”. His critique also appears to be based quite heavily on one model of family life – his own Italian-American upbringing – as being the only desirable ideal.
The Festival of Ideas’ offering of one-hour lunchtime talks is an excellent one – a chance to cram in some wisdom along with your packed lunch. But as this talk demonstrated, the event does need to be specifically tailored for such a tight time-slot. Otherwise you get a lot of talk about the problems, and too little about the solutions.
Philip Zimbardo spoke at Watershed on Wednesday, May 6. For more Festival of Ideas events, visit www.ideasfestival.co.uk/whats-on
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