Word: zimbardo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...This view is also held by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University and possibly the leading U.S. authority on the anatomy of vandalism. Years of study and experimentation have gone into Zimbardo's theory, which plausibly explains the present-and in Zimbardo's judgment seemingly irreversible-national surge in such destruction. The vandal is typically young (nearly 80% of all those arrested are under 18), and the young of today care little for the society their fathers built. Furthermore, in an age of expanding permissiveness, the vandal is no longer so heavily concentrated...
...they become, to the young at least, an accepted part of life. Wholesale renunciation of traditional values -the death of faith, the obsolescence of marriage, the campus as a locale for riot, the cop seen as pig-casts the adolescent adrift from all moorings. In this respect, according to Zimbardo, vandalism is "an attempt to show you have some effect on your environment. Destructive acts are chosen because they are more readily seen and because they are often more easily accomplished than constructive ones...