Award Winners

This year’s William James Book Award winners are Philip G. Zimbardo and Robert L. Johnson. Their book, Psychology according to Shakespeare: What You Can Learn about Human Nature from Shakespeare’s Great Plays, explores Shakespeare’s knowledge of psychology long before psychology was a formal discipline. Most abnormal psychology textbooks cite Lady Macbeth’s constant hand washing as a prototypical example of compulsions, but this book goes far beyond Lady Macbeth. From King Lear’s jealousy to nature vs. nurture in The Tempest to the stages of a man’s (and woman’s) life in As You Like It, this book explores why Shakespeare’s plays have been so enduring.

William Shakespeare has undergone psychological analyses ever since Freud diagnosed Hamlet with an Oedipus complex. But now, in Psychology According to Shakespeare, Drs. Johnson and Zimbardo have turned the tables by telling how the Bard himself understood human behavior and the innermost workings of the mind.

What initially grabbed their mutual interest was the realization that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure anticipated Professor Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment by some four hundred years. From that launch-point, Johnson and Zimbardo probed deeply into Shakespeare’s writings, bringing together, for the first time in one volume, a psychological perspective on the playwright’s own understanding of topics across the spectrum of psychology: love, jealousy, sleep, dreams, memory, betrayal, revenge, power, and pride, as well as his sophisticated understanding of concepts we now call cognitive biases, developmental stages, personality, motivation, emotion, cognitive dissonance, and a host of mental disorders.

Philip Zimbardo and Robert Johnson collaborated for a quarter-century, working together on six editions of the popular introductory textbook Psychology: Core Concepts. Their association has thrived on the melding of their wide and mutual interests, plus the belief that all knowledge is like a web of interconnections (with psychology in the center, of course). Accordingly, it should be no surprise that their interdisciplinary interests encompassed Mr. Shakespeare’s works.

Dr. Zimbardo was Emeritus Professor of Psychology from Stanford University until his passing in October 2024. He was widely known for his Stanford Prison Experiment and for his book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (also a Wm. James Book Award winner in 2008).

Dr. Johnson is a retired professor of psychology from Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon. His professional interests center on interdisciplinary connections between psychology and the arts, sciences, and humanities. He has lectured extensively on the link between Shakespeare and psychology.