Here are 39 retirement messages from some of your fans and secret admirers:


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Those you have touched, have touched others. You'll never know the full impact of the work you have done!

Thank you and best wishes for a wonderful and well-deserved retirement!

Wendy Rivilis
Bloomfield High School
United States

Dear Mr. Zimbardo,

Hello, how are you doing?

Congratulations on your successful career throughout psychology. I enjoy watching all your works on the show "Discovering Psychology." You and the crew there do a wonderful job with all the interesting topics in psychology. I personally enjoyed the episode with the baby "Albert," the child who was conditioned to become afraid of anything soft. All the episodes are well done, and I will miss watching you after I go to college next year.

My best wishes to you, and much success in all your future work. Have fun with new excitements life brings you now.

Jacob Rudy
Walsingham Academy
United States

Thank you for all you have done to promote psychology at the high school and college levels. I used the second edition of your text as an undergraduate, and my current and past advanced placement students have enjoyed your "Discovering Psychology" series. When they enter my room and see the TV and VCR set up, one of the first questions is if they are going to be getting a "Phil Fix."

Allan Stevenson
Annapolis Senior High
United States

Retire? Never! You enter my high school classroom each day through your video series. My students and I feel we know you well. You are our teacher and have been an important part of my course for over 10 years. Only my best wishes for a happy and joyful retirement. Thank you for all of your work and effort.

Pat Wilkes
Our Lady of Lourdes Academy
United States

Dr. Z--

I've been studying psychology for ten years now, and you have been there the whole time. We used Psych & Life in my first psych course and watched Discovering Psych clips. You were fundamental to my interest in studying social psychology (I am now a third-year Ph.D. student in Portland State's Applied Social Psychology).

But despite being an amazing writer and researcher who has touched our field, I won't remember you mostly from these things. My first professional conference as an undergraduate was the WPA in Irvine '99. I was presenting in the Social-Personality Poster Session when I saw you. It's impossible not to recognize Phil Z. When I realized that you were signing autographs and talking with people, I started thinking. I had no idea that you would be signing books right there and then, but since I drove up from San Diego (where I got my BA), I had my car. My car was messy, and in the back was not only my original Psychology & Life book from my first Psych class but so was a book on Persuasion from the late 70's co-written by you, Ebbesen, & Maslach that I picked up since my senior thesis was going to be on persuasion.

Meeting you and getting you to sign all of those books (you also gave me a new edition of Psych & Life and signed it for my friend) was a great experience. I came to realize that you are a great person as well as a great social psychologist. The field will miss you. I'll miss seeing you walking around WPA conferences and hope that you will stop in and visit us from time to time. You have been an inspiration for my whole generation of social psychologists.

Daniel Wilson
Portland State University
United States

Dr. Zimbardo,

During the tenure as APA President, your column in the Monitor always worked to inspire me with admiration for the work that psychologists can accomplish. As a graduate student in psychology, I needed that monthly reminder to help me find a connection with the field. Thank you! Your contributions to students, colleagues, and the global community are innumerable! I cannot express enough my sincerest congratulations on the beginning of a new chapter in your life. I have no doubt that this time will be as challenging and rewarding as the decades in psychology. Perhaps, your best work is yet to come!

Samantha Wilson
Saint Louis University
United States

Standing in the corridor of Jordan Hall as a freshman, unknowingly wearing your lab coat as the lowly (double-blinded) research assistant of a senior undergraduate, I bumped into this crazy, frenetic man who wanted know how the experiment was going. "Fine," I mumbled, and I was pleased to see him scurry away. Then it occurred to me... that was Zimbardo. And I had sincerely regarded you as a probable Joe Euclid. In later years I went on to have an office where the old prison had been; I would have you drive me to the bank with over $10,000 in cash from sales of your textbook (as you convinced me that post-hypnotic suggestions are REAL); and I would be forgiven for allowing my section of Mind Control to create an irreverent video in which you were depicted as a sexed-up "Italian Stallion."

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for these memories and for treating all of us eager undergraduates with such loving kindness and forbearance. You certainly indoctrinated us into an extraordinarily rewarding, consuming faith. A la salud!

Now a Colleague, Wons Ur-Student
Order of the Z
United States

Dr. Zimbardo,

I am a high school psychology teacher who happened upon the first version of Discovering Psychology. I cannot tell you how many of my students have come back after graduation and having started their undergraduate work to tell me in their intro class your tapes were used. They were pleased because they were well prepared for the experience. Thanks for all your work.

William Young
Harriton High School
United States

Dear Phil,

We heard that you were retiring and wanted you to know that we have admired your work for many years and wish you many years of happy retirement. Thanks to people like you, we have, as Dan Quayle once said, “the best educated American people in the world.”

All the best,

Lois and Levy Zur
United States


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