Fascinating interview with Dr. Zimbardo here
He’s just written a new book about his experiment and has a website here to discuss the work he’s been doing on heroism. About his book, he says
And the debate is…?
Discuss 
No, really. What do people reading about this think? Do they agree with Zimbardo or think something else; that perhaps some people are intrinsically evil or that Satan makes people do bad things or something else? Or does everyone agree with Zimbardo, in which case I guess it would just be MPSIMS.
More stuff. Are you shocked by this? Frightened? Do you think you would never succumb to the pressures were you a ‘prisoner’ or a ‘guard’? To me, this is a very good example of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’.
Evil gets a foothold in people when they’re put to a spiritual test and fail. I’d say that almost always the test takes place when the child is around 4. If the child (i.e. soul that’s in the young body) passes the test, then they’ll have either a happy stress-free life or they’ll die and be done with this crap-hole called earth (as there may be no point in hanging around).
That’s an interesting theory. What kind of ‘test’ are you talking about? Who does the testing? What constitutes ‘pass’ or ‘fail’?
I don’t particularly disagree with Zimbardo, but I don’t think that it’s always a foregone conclusion that things will go bad when you give people power over someone else. To some extent, all his experiment showed was that if you get some college-age males together and say “Roleplay a Jail!” that they’ll go overboard. I.e. he proved that college-age males are often stupid.
But I do agree that pack-behavior is one of the larger causes of people doing evil things. If one person can create a nefarious SOP within a group, then that will include even people who are generally nice, decent people. But that requires that there be the one person to start it, and that no one else in the pack halts it at the early stages. I.e. it largely matters on the relative charisma of the players.
For instance, at my current company, the head of the company is a jerk who would yell at the employees randomly when he was in a bad mood, calling them useless idiots and such. I opposed this while I was there and, being a rather intimidating guy, the head of the company has mellowed (and for the most part avoids me where possible) and I’ve become a bit of a celebrity with my co-workers.
So it just all depends on how things play out, and how many leaders there are in the group.
Some people are truly evil and will seek to do evil acts seemingly autonomously. Most people can be coerced into evil if they can attribute that act to an alpha and if they face personal consequences, no matter how slight, for ignoring the order. The End.
Okay real-world example. You have been assigned as a guard at Treblinka (let’s
assume some sort of body-swap scenario so that “you” are the person you are
right now-2007 A.D.-presumably with a personal code of ethics of sorts). What do
you do? Your options seem distressingly limited:
-
Refuse to throw the kill switch in the “showers”? Okay you will then die in front
of a firing squad. -
Desert your post. In the middle of Germany, during wartime? Good luck getting
to the Swiss border without being caught. -
Try to fulfill the letter of your orders but not necessarily the spirit? Maybe you
could get away with that maybe not. Sneak the prisoners extra snacks and medicine
and whatnot from time to time.
In any event I always wondered why hardly any of the soldiers assigned to such places
ever did desert. Maybe the alternatives were in fact all worse than institutional murder…
I started a thread on this once. Most people admitted that they would follow orders in Nazi Germany to commit genocide. That seems pretty honest and realistic. The regular Germans were nice enough people even if the food was bad and they drank too much beer. I know for a fact that I would have committed genocide against adults to save myself and family. I don’t know what I would have done for kids but that would have caused terrible distress. I wonder if they had “special troops” kill the kids because I don’t know a lot of people that could go through with that.
Except that, of course, the guards in concentration camps weren’t chosen randomly. They were under no threat, and no one was ever killed for not slaughtering Jews, AFAIK. Pople quite voluntarily did these things, becaue they were excused from combat duty and got extra pay and rations.
I can’t go into. Sorry. 
(And I can’t even go into the reasons why I can’t.)
Here’s another recent article by Philip Zimbardo about his experiment.
You’ll note he continues to describe it as a “bad situation” that effected “good people”. But the situation was only what Zimbardo and the students created. They were the ones who got out of control but they prefer to blame the setting rather than admit their own failings.
The most telling point was Zimbardo’s girlfriend’s reaction when she was exposed to the experiment after it had been running for five days. She saw what was going on and said to Zimbardo, “It is terrible what YOU are doing to those boys!”
Does Zimbardo really believe that five days of running a mock prison radically changed his personality and created something new in him? He should acknowledge that his behavior that week was based on existing aspects of his personality and draw his conclusions from that. He should stop saying that running a mock prison turns anyone bad and start admitting that having unchecked authority turned Philip Zimbardo bad.
I take it you mean ‘affected’.
Then what is your explanation for the blue eye / brown eye experiment?
Or Milgram?
So then the psych examination of all the ‘guards’ that showed them to be normal were false? What, exactly, is your point?
Ummm…that they provide more evidence that I’m right?
Seriously, are you even trying to understand what I’m saying?
I’m trying but all I’m getting is that the only bad guy in the world ever is Zimbardo. Want to try to be a little clearer?
My personal opinion? I think these experiments are utter nonsense and not worth the paper they’re printed on. He tested 24 students. If you put these experiments under any sort of scrutiny, they fall apart. He was involved in the experiment. How objective is that? I think they’re a great way to sell books but they’re meaningless.
Are you saying that ALL people have the propensity toward doing the wrong thing given the right/wrong circumstances?
Or are you saying the Zimbardo himself was predisposed toward doing the wrong thing and only some people are this way?
Okay, I’ll try again. Zimbardo described his experiment as a test between good and evil (literally). He said it was “the direct confrontation of good versus evil, of good people pitted against the forces inherent in bad situations”. He made several references to how his students were all “good people” (people like him although he doesn’t explicitly admit this). And then he puts them into a mock prison environment and creates the type of situations he imagines exist in real prisons and everybody, including himself, starts acting terribly. So he calls off the experiment after five days and then spends three decades hawking books about it.
And here’s his conclusion: everything was the fault of the environment. Zimbardo maintains that he’s a good person and the students are good people and it was the “situation” that made them all act badly for those five days. So his conclusion was that working in a prison environment makes people act badly. And that’s nonsense. People live and work decades inside prisons without exhibiting any of the behavior that Zimbardo was seeing after only a few hours.
The reality is that Zimbardo created an artificial environment where the participants felt isolated from the normal constraints of society and were encouraged to act out the roles of victims and victimizers. And it was discovered that “good people” fell into these roles very easily. But it was the people who did this not the environment. Zimbardo could have achieved the same results in a college dorm but that wouldn’t have been an indictment of the college system.
The dangers of these false conclusion are when people start believing that their environment controls and excuses their actions. Zimbardo and his students acted the way they thought “prison guards” should act. So did the guards at Abu Ghraib - almost none of whom had any prior training or experience in working in real prisons. Every month I deal with new employees and have to tell many of them not to do things like they’ve seen in movies and TV.
People who blame the situation for their actions are abrogating their own moral responsibilities as individuals. People need to remember they are thinking individuals and are responsible for their actions. The situation isn’t pulling the trigger or using a cattle prod - you are.
Zimbardo would have done a lot more good for society if instead of spreading the message “there are certain situations that will make you act bad so you should avoid those situations” he had told the true message, “all of us are capable of acting badly so we should develop a sense of morality that is independent of our environment.”
Hopefully, my previous post answered these questions, but if not, I’ll state that I don’t feel that Philip Zimbardo was predisposed towards behaving badly or otherwise morally flawed. I just feel he was unaware that the possibility of acting badly existing in him all along (as it does in most people) but when he discovered this part of himself, he denied it. He projected the bad aspects of his own personality onto the environment he was in. The danger of this is that he may believe that as long as he stays out of that environment those bad aspects don’t exist. He’d have been better off acknowledging that he’s always carrying them around and should learn how to prevent them from resurfacing.
And like I said, Philip Zimbardo is no different than the rest of us. Virtually all of us contain some ugly possibilities in some parts of our mind. The best way to keep them safe is to recognize their existence and keep them under control rather than pretending they don’t exist.
I watched Zimbardo telling his story on Democracy Now last night, and one thing really stood out for me: A woman called it for what it was as soon as she saw it. Zimbardo admitted he was power tripping until his girlfriend brought him back to reality. I guess this happened at a time before the concept of “emotional intelligence” was widely acknowledged.
But there’s a woman on my block
Sitting there in a cold chill
She say “Who gonna take away his license to kill?”
–Bob Dylan