aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

Knowing your capacity for evil

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo was the guest for the full hour on Radio Open Source last week.  He’s perhaps best known for the 1971 prison experiment that tested our shared notions about the boundaries between good and evil by turning good students into evil prison guards in less than 6 days.

During the Open Source interview he warned that we have to know that we, too, could go there - that we, I, me, might have abused prisoners at Abu Ghriab or killed my Tutsi neighbors or sided with the Germans against the Jews or owned slaves here in the South - in order to keep from going there. The program really deserves a listen.

Another interview with Zimbardo appeared in the NYTimes yesterday:

Q. You keep using this phrase “the situation” to describe the underlying cause of wrongdoing. What do you mean?

A. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The “situation” is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.

Q. So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart?”

A. That’s not true. Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.