Success Quote by Philip Zimbardo

Spare, almost bureaucratic, Zimbardo's line lands like an institutional memo precisely because it refuses romance. "Academic success" is framed less as insight, teaching, or intellectual risk than as output: research conducted, papers produced, citations accumulated. It's a compact description of academia's incentive structure, and the bluntness is the point. By choosing "depends", he narrows the definition of success to what can be counted, evaluated, and traded inside professional hierarchies.

The subtext is a quiet warning about how the system shapes behavior. When publications become the currency, scholars optimize for what journals will accept: incremental findings, fashionable methods, safe hypotheses, strategic coauthorship. Work that matters but travels slowly - mentoring, public scholarship, replication, careful null results - slips to the margins because it doesn't convert cleanly into lines on a CV. The phrase also hints at a gatekeeping reality: without a steady stream of publishable research, you're not just overlooked; you're structurally blocked from grants, tenure, and prestige.

Context matters with Zimbardo. As a psychologist whose Stanford Prison Experiment became a cultural shorthand for situational power, he's acutely aware of how environments script conduct. Here, he is effectively applying that lens to academia itself: the "situation" of publish-or-perish produces predictable outcomes, including distorted priorities and, at the extreme, questionable research practices. The sentence isn't inspirational; it's diagnostic, and its chill is the diagnosis.