Exploring evil
03/22/7
Ever wonder how an atrocity like Abu Ghraib was allowed to happen? How about the genocide in Rwanda? Or the Holocaust?
Dr. Philip Zimbardo is one man who was determined to find out, and in the late 1960s he supervised the “Stanford Prison Experiment” at Stanford University, where he continues to be a psychology professor. That notorious episode involved his choosing randomly selected healthy, normal college students to pretend to be either prisoners or guards in what was planned to be a two-week study in human behavior under intense conditions. The conditions grew even worse than he imagined, however, and Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment after only six days when everything spiraled out of control, with emotional breakdowns and pacifistic students carrying out violence against others.
What Zimbardo came to believe is that situational power — the power one gains in a particular circumstance — is stronger than people realize and can even overpower the normal moral dispositions of individuals. He has gone on to devise a concept called The Lucifer Effect, which seeks to explain how good people turn evil, and has also completed studies on why some people are able to avoid the easy allure of evil behavior.
This Sunday, Zimbardo is combining all his findings in a talk about The Lucifer Effect, bringing it to Caltech for a special lecture sponsored by the ever-fascinating Skeptics Society. We can scarcely think of a more unique way to spend a Sunday afternoon than an entertaining exploration of evil.
—Carl Kozlowski
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