Bullies may be the perpetrators of evil, but it is the evil of passivity of all those who know what is happening and never intervene that perpetuates such abuse.
Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying 'get with the program, be a team player;' this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal.
What troubles me is the Internet and the electronic technology revolution. Shyness is fueled in part by so many people spending huge amounts of time alone, isolated on e-mail, in chat rooms, which reduces their face-to-face contact with other people.
At North Hollywood High School, I was shunned by everyone. I would sit down in the cafeteria, and students would get up from the table and walk away. They thought I was from the Mafia.
After doing psychology for half a century, my passion for all of it is greater than ever.
Careers in virtually all academic disciplines are fostered by being a superstar who knows more about one subject than anyone else in the world.
I started studying shyness in adults in 1972. Shyness operates at so many different levels. Out of that research came the Stanford shyness clinic in 1977.
The Stanford prison experiment came out of class exercises in which I encouraged students to understand the dynamics of prison life.
There are no limits to what I would do to make my classes exciting, interesting, unpredictable.
Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school. In Canada, five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school.
Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.'
Bullies are often people who are shy and can't make friends easily, so, as the theme of the movie 'A Bronx Tale' tells us, it is better to be feared if you can't be loved.
