Coming Changes in Our Concept of Self

Next we’ll look at our deepest impulses toward moral action, love, and fidelity. Two of the world’s foremost experts on this subject will assess how these central aspects of our humanity could evolve over the next 10 years.

Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo describes his most recent endeavor, The Heroic Imagination Project, an exploration of the psychology of heroism. Zimbardo is uniquely qualified to speak on the strange ways that people can play off one another when they’re suddenly thrust into new networks and asked to take on new roles.

In 1971, Zimbardo gathered together 24 Stanford undergraduates to perform a mock prison experiment in the basement of the university’s psychology building. Participants were randomly assigned the role of guard or prisoner. The experiment was stopped after only six days when the students assigned to be guards began abusing their classmates. In his new research, he looks at “what pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of those in need?”

Finally, Helen Fisher, Rutgers University anthropologist and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Henry Holt 2004), examines the institution of marriage and discusses how our understanding of love and fidelity will change in the next two decades. The amount of new data we are gathering about the chemical and biological roots of romantic partnership will challenge our traditional assumptions about these most important connections in our social web, presenting new obstacles and creating new opportunities in the decades ahead. —PMT