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The Line Between Good and Evil Lies in the Human Heart

By Carolyn Kaufman, PsyD

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo designed an experiment to find out what would happen “when you put good people in an evil place?  Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?”  Like most people, the researchers probably assumed that there are evil people just looking for a sadistic opportunity, and good people who would rise above the situation and resist evil.

What they found wasn’t quite so simple.

The Setup

College students chosen for the experiment were given psychological testing to rule out psychological problems or weaknesses; those who passed this stage were randomly assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards.”

The guards were given permission to do whatever they needed to to break the prisoners down, short of physically harming them.

The Incarceration

The prisoners were arrested at their homes "as part of a mass arrest for violation of Penal Codes 211, Armed Robbery, and Burglary, a 459 PC" by real police and put into the backs of real police cars while their neighbors watched. (Can you see explaining that later? You: "Really, it was all part of an experiment I signed up for." Neighbors: "Suuuurrrre it was.") Those who asked if this was part of the experiment were given no answers until they arrived at the basement of the psych department at Stanford University, where the mock prison had been set up.

The prisoners were stripped, "deloused," and given shapeless sacklike uniforms and stockings to cover their hair. They were also assigned numbers to replace their names.

The Deterioration

The prisoners didn't take things too seriously at first, and the guards, angry at being mocked and disrespected, came down hard. Within 36 hours, the first prisoner cracked, crying and begging to be released from the experiment. The researchers thought he was trying to trick them, and he was sent back to his cell, where he was mocked as being weak by the guards. He told the other prisoners, "You can't leave. You can't quit."

This realization only made him deteriorate further, and he broke down screaming, "I'm all ___ed up inside! I'm all ____ed up! I want out! Let me out!"

Eventually the researchers realized that Prisoner 8612 was genuinely breaking down, and they released him. They would later regret their decision and try to figure out a way to trick him into returning.

And the situation only deteriorated from there. A mild nightmare compared to what happened at Abu Ghirab, but still frighteningly similar.

The experiment, which was slated to run for two weeks, was stopped after less than one -- but only after one of Zimbardo's research assistants who wasn't involved demanded that it be stopped.

Clearly, the situation was more powerful than the experimenters had anticipated. This effect has been shown again and again by both research and life.

Stanley Milgrim's Obedience Study

Stanley Milgrim conducted an experiment on obedience that is often mentioned in the same breath as Zimbardo's.

Milgrim's Experiment

Subjects were ordered to administer increasingly dangerous and even lethal shocks to a confederate (someone in on the experiment -- that is, he wasn't really being shocked, though the subjects didn't know that!) Though many of the subjects asked and even begged to be stop the shocks, when the experimenter told them they had to continue they did -- in fact, most of them continued even after they believed the confederate had had a heart attack and was unconscious.

Zimbardo on The Lucifer Effect

"War," Zimbardo told us at a recent talk on his newest book, The Lucifer Effect, "is always about old men sending young men to kill other young men." And few compulsions are so strong as that to obey one's authority figures. Especially authority figures who understand human psychology.

"The military knows about this research," he said when discussing Abu Ghirab. "They should; it's 35 years old. They ignored it. They put people in positions of power with no supervisor. [And] it always starts with 15 volts; over time it gets worse. The guards get bored and their only playthings are the prisoners."

And Zimbardo argues that the line between good and evil runs straight through the human heart. Nazi war criminal "Eichmann was normal until you put him in a position of power...[evil people] look like your next door neighbor — they don't look like comic book monsters."

Our "fascination with evil," Zimbardo believes, "is with the exertion of power. The more creative, the better." But evil can also be subtle. "Prejudice and discrimination is [sic] about dehumanization." And seeing another human being as less than you, as somehow less human than you, is all it takes to start down the path to evil.

Zimbardo says there are three paths from which we all must choose.

Zimbardo on The Daily ShowPath 1 - Become a perpetrator of Evil

Be like those guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment or the subjects who believed they were shocking an innocent person simply because someone in authority told them to. Be hateful to those who are different from you, reducing them to "those Latinos" or "gay people" or "people with mental illness" — dehumanizing them.

Path 2 - Be passive and inactive.

Commit "the evil of inaction" by standing by and doing nothing. Edmund Burke once wrote, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Path 3 - Be a hero.

"Heroes," Zimbardo asserts, "are ordinary people doing heroic deeds by acting when others are passive." Like the research assistant who told Zimbardo himself that "what you are doing to these boys is just awful." Like the three servicemen at My Lai who stopped their comrades' massacre of innocent Vietnamese during the Vietnam War.

Being a hero is the most difficult choice; it often requires you to risk yourself and sometimes even your life to do what's right. And it's tough to go against everyone else's assertions that what is happening is just and right.

Zimbardo warns that we must always be ready to be a hero, because "the opportunity will only come once in your life."

Don't miss it.

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