Heroic Imagination Project

The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP) was founded by Philip Zimbardo in 2010 as an educational initiative to train ordinary people in the skills of everyday heroism — the willingness to act on behalf of others in situations of injustice, bullying, or emergency. The project emerged directly from Zimbardo's analysis of the Stanford prison experiment: if situations can make people cruel, Zimbardo reasoned, then situations can also be engineered to make people courageous.

HIP operates on the premise that heroism is not a rare virtue possessed by exceptional individuals but a set of teachable skills that can be cultivated through education and practice. The curriculum draws on social psychological research to teach students how to recognize situational pressures, overcome deindividuation, and act as "heroes-in-waiting" in their daily lives.

The project's theoretical significance lies in its inversion of the diagnostic orientation of classic social psychology. Where the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments asked "what makes people harmful?", HIP asks "what makes people helpful?" — shifting the field from a pathology-oriented to a capability-oriented framework. Whether this shift represents genuine progress or an unjustified optimism about the malleability of human behavior remains debated.