http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/14/us/connecticut-school-shooting/inde...
i would like to ask:-
* is there such a thing as 'evil'?
* could the 'evil' be just individual people?
could the 'evil' be an uncaring society that drives people mad?
--
I ask, becos I'm curious.
Just answer the damn question, not the questioner! Don't
presume. My personal matters/beliefs are none of your
business. I ask, you answer. If you think my questions
are stupid, you have already proven that you are stupid,
not me. If you don't know the answer, can you please
"pass" to more capable person(s) to answer?
The Lucifer Effect raises a fundamental question about the nature of
human nature: How is it possible for ordinary, average, even good
people to become perpetrators of evil? In trying to understand
unusual, or aberrant behavior, we often err in focusing exclusively on
the inner determinants of genes, personality, and character, as we
also tend to ignore what may be the critical catalyst for behavior
change in the external Situation or in the System that creates and
maintains such situations. I challenge readers to reflect on how well
they really know themselves, and how much confidence they have in what
they would or would not ever do when put into new behavioral
settings.
http://www.lucifereffect.com/about_synopsis.htm
....just the right dose of certain social situations can transform
ordinarily good people into evildoers, as was the case with Iraqi
prisoner abusers at Abu Ghraib, argued former APA president Philip G.
Zimbardo, PhD, in a presidential-track program during APA's 2004
Annual Convention in Honolulu.
Indeed, Zimbardo--an emeritus psychology professor at Stanford
University--highlighted how this Dr. Hyde transformation occurred
among U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib by presenting classic psychology
research on situational effects on human behavior.
Zimbardo, who will be an expert witness for several of the U.S.
soldiers on trial, argued that situations pull people to act in ways
they never thought imaginable.
"That line between good and evil is permeable," Zimbardo said. "Any of
us can move across it....I argue that we all have the capacity for
love and evil--to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein.
It's the situation that brings that out."
Seduced into evil
In fact, the classic electric shock experiment by social psychologist
Stanley Milgram, PhD, showed that when given an order by someone in
authority, people would deliver what they believed to be extreme
levels of electrical shock to other study participants who answered
questions incorrectly.
Zimbardo said the experiment provides several lessons about how
situations can foster evil:
* Provide people with an ideology to
justify beliefs for actions.
* Make people take a small first step toward
a harmful act with a minor, trivial action and
then gradually increase those small actions.
* Make those in charge seem like a
"just authority."
* Transform a once compassionate
leader into a dictatorial figure.
* Provide people with vague and
ever-changing rules.
* Relabel the situation's actors and
their actions to legitimize the ideology.
* Provide people with social models
of compliance.
* Allow dissent, but only if people
continue to comply with orders.
* Make exiting the situation difficult.
Particularly notable, Zimbardo said, is that people are seduced into
evil by dehumanizing and labeling others.
"They semantically change their perception of victims, of the evil
act, and change the relationship of the aggressor to their aggression--
so 'killing' or 'hurting' becomes the same as 'helping,'" he said.
For example, in a 1975 experiment by psychologist Albert Bandura, PhD,
college students were told they'd work with students from another
school on a group task. In one condition, they overheard an assistant
calling the other students "animals" and in another condition, "nice."
Bandura found students were more apt to deliver what they believed
were increased levels of electrical shock to the other students if
they had heard them called "animals."
People's aggression can also increase when they feel anonymous--for
example if they wear a uniform, hood or mask, Zimbardo said.
"You minimize social responsibility," he explained. "Nobody knows who
you are, so therefore you are not individually liable. There's also a
group effect when all of you are masked. It provides a fear in other
people because they can't see you, and you lose your humanity."
For example, an experiment in 1974 by Harvard anthropologist John
Watson evaluated 23 cultures to determine whether warriors who changed
their appearance--such as with war paint or masks--treated their
victims differently. As it turned out, 80 percent of warriors in these
cultures were found to be more destructive--for example, killing,
torturing or mutilating their victims--than unpainted or unmasked
warriors.
What's more, a person's anonymity can be induced by acting in an
anonymity-conferring environment that adds to the pleasure of
destruction, vandalism and the power of being in control, Zimbardo
noted.
"It's not just seeing people hurt, it's doing things that you have a
sense that you are controlling behavior of other people in ways that
you typically don't," Zimbardo said.
Zimbardo noticed that in his own simulated jail experiment in 1971--
the Stanford Prison Experiment--in which college students played the
roles of prisoners or guards, and the guards became brutal and abusive
toward prisoners after just six days, leading Zimbardo to prematurely
end the experiment. The experiment showed that institutional forces
and peer pressure led normal student volunteer guards to disregard the
potential harm of their actions on the other student prisoners.
"You don't need a motive," Zimbardo said. "All you really need is a
situation that facilitates moving across that line of good and evil."
Prison abuses
The same social psychological processes--deindividualization,
anonymity of place, dehumanization, role-playing and social modeling,
moral disengagement and group conformity--that acted in the Stanford
Prison Experiment were at play at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo argued.
So is it a few bad apples that spoil a barrel? "That's what we want to
believe--that we could never be a bad apple," Zimbardo said. "We're
the good ones in the barrel." But people can be influenced, regardless
of their intention to resist, he said.
As such, the Abu Ghraib soldiers' mental state--such as stress, fear,
boredom and heat exhaustion, coupled with no supervision, no training
and no accountability--may have further contributed to their "evil"
actions, he noted.
"I argue situational forces dominate most of us at various times in
our lives," Zimbardo said, "even though we'd all like to believe we're
each that singular hero who can resist those powerful external
pressures, like Joe Darby, the whistle-blowing hero of the Abu Ghraib
prison."
http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct04/goodbad.html
The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology
experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram,
which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an
authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted
with their personal conscience.
...Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils
of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous
importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in
concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University
to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another
person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants']
strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the
subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the
victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of
adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority
constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently
demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular
hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive
process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work
become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few
people have the resources needed to resist authority....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
=====================================
"dispositional" and "situational" factors
a man acts like a "bad apple" because of his bad core disposition.
a is merely acting like any normal apple thrown into a bad
situation... or a "bad barrel",
In August of 1971, social psychologist Philip Zimbardo performed an
infamous experiment at Stanford University, one whose results still
send a shudder down the spine because of what they reveal about the
dark side of human nature. In The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How
Good People Turn Evil (Random House, $27.95), Zimbardo recalls the
Stanford Prison Experiment in cinematic detail. We watch as nice,
middle-class young men turn sadistic; the experiment is terminated
prematurely due to its character-imploding power. These events shaped
the rest of Zimbardo’s career, focusing him on the psychology of evil,
including violence, torture, and terrorism. In 2004 he served as an
expert witness for the defense in one of the Abu Ghraib court-marshal
hearings. Zimbardo gives a detailed analysis of the events at Abu
Ghraib in this new book, drawing on social psychology research, the
military’s investigative reports, his own interviews, and hundreds of
photos never released to the general public. Like Russian poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a former prisoner in Stalin’s gulag, he argues
that “the line between good and evil is in the center of every human
heart.”
Horrific Images of Abuse at Abu Ghraib
In May 2004, we all saw vivid images of young American men and women
engaged in unimaginable forms of torture against civilians they were
supposed to be guarding. The tormentors and the tormented were
captured in an extensive display of digitally documented depravity
that the soldiers themselves had made during their violent escapades.
The images are of punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping
on their feet; forcibly arranging naked, hooded prisoners in piles and
pyramids; forcing male prisoners to masturbate or simulate fellatio;
dragging a prisoner around with a leash tied to his neck; and using
unmuzzled attack dogs to frighten prisoners.
I was shocked, but I was not surprised. The media and the “person in
the street” around the globe asked how such evil deeds could be
perpetrated by these seven men and women, whom military leaders had
labeled as “rogue soldiers” and “a few bad apples.” Instead, I
wondered what circumstances in that prison cellblock could have tipped
the balance and led even good soldiers to do such bad things.
The reason that I was shocked but not surprised by the images and
stories of prisoner abuse in the Abu Ghraib “little shop of horrors”
was that, three decades earlier, I had witnessed eerily similar scenes
as they unfolded in a project that I directed: naked, shackled
prisoners with bags over their heads, guards stepping on prisoners’
backs as they did push-ups, guards sexually humiliating prisoners, and
prisoners suffering from extreme stress. Some images from my
experiment are practically interchangeable with those from Iraq.
Not only had I seen such events, I had been responsible for creating
the conditions that allowed such abuses to flourish. As the project’s
principal investigator, I designed the experiment that randomly
assigned normal, healthy, intelligent college students to enact the
roles of either guards or prisoners in a realistically simulated
prison setting where they were to live and work for several weeks. My
student research associates and I wanted to understand the dynamics
operating in the psychology of imprisonment.
How do ordinary people adapt to such an institutional setting? How do
the power differentials between guards and prisoners play out in their
daily interactions? If you put good people in a bad place, do the
people triumph or does the place corrupt them? Would the violence that
is endemic to most real prisons be absent in a prison filled with good
middle-class boys?
Anonymity and Deindividuation
The enduring interest in the Stanford Prison Experiment over many
decades comes, I think, from the experiment’s startling revelation of
“transformation of character”—of good people suddenly becoming
perpetrators of evil as guards or pathologically passive as prisoners
in response to situational forces acting on them.
Situational forces mount in power with the introduction of uniforms,
costumes, and masks, all disguises of one’s usual appearance that
promote anonymity and reduce personal accountability. When people feel
anonymous in a situation, as if no one is aware of their true identity
(and thus that no one probably cares), they can more easily be induced
to behave in antisocial ways.
When all members of a group are in a deindividuated state, their
mental functioning changes: they live in an expanded-present moment
that makes past and future distant and irrelevant. Feelings dominate
reason, and action dominates reflection. The usual cognitive and
motivational processes that steer behavior in socially desirable paths
no longer guide people. It becomes as easy to make war as to make
love, without considering the consequences.
At Abu Ghraib, MP Chip Frederick recalls, “It was clear that there was
no accountability.” It became the norm for guards to stop wearing
their full military uniforms while on duty. All around them, most
visitors and the civilian interrogators came and went unnamed. No one
in charge was readily identifiable, and the seemingly endless mass of
prisoners, wearing orange jumpsuits or totally naked, were also
indistinguishable from one another. It was as extreme a setting for
creating deindividuation as I can imagine.
Dehumanization of prisoners occurred by virtue of their sheer numbers,
enforced nakedness, and uniform appearance, as well as by the guards’
inability to understand their language. One night shift MP, Ken Davis,
later reported how dehumanization had been bred into their thinking:
“As soon as we’d have prisoners come in, sandbags instantly on their
head. They would flexicuff ’em; throw ’em down to the ground; some
would be stripped. It was told to all of us, they’re nothing but
dogs. . . . You start looking at these people as less than human, and
you start doing things to ’em that you would never dream of.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment relied on deindividuating silver
reflecting sunglasses for the guards along with standard military-
style uniforms. The power the guards assumed each time they donned
these uniforms was matched by the powerlessness the prisoners felt in
their wrinkled smocks. Obviously, Abu Ghraib Prison was a far more
lethal environment than our relatively benign prison at Stanford.
However, in both cases, the worst abuses occurred during the night
shift, when guards felt that the authorities noticed them least. It is
reminiscent of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where supervising grown-
ups were absent as the masked marauders created havoc.
Why Situations Matter
We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in
their power to resist external pressures. The Stanford Prison
Experiment is a clarion call to abandon simplistic notions of the Good
Self dominating Bad Situations. We are best able to avoid, challenge,
and change negative situational forces only by recognizing their
potential to “infect us” as they have others who were similarly
situated. This lesson should have been taught repeatedly by the
behavioral transformation of Nazi concentration camp guards, and by
the genocide and atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda,
Burundi, and Sudan’s Darfur region.
Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is
possible for any of us—under the right circumstances. That knowledge
does not excuse evil; it democratizes it, sharing its blame among
ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province of deviants and
despots—of Them but not Us. The primary lesson of the Stanford Prison
Experiment is that situations can lead us to behave in ways we would
not, could not, predict possible in advance.
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/book-excerpt
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Think of a prison. Consider the guards. What are they like? Chances
are that most people would imagine prison guards to be tough, callous,
unfeeling people. Some might even consider them to be cruel,
tyrannical, and sadistic. People who take this kind of dispositional
view of the world might suggest that the reason people become guards
is to have an opportunity to exercise their cruelty with relative
impunity. Picture the prisoners. What are they like? Rebellious?
Docile? No matter what specific pictures exist inside of our heads,
the point is there are pictures there -- and most of us believe that
the prisoners and the guards are quite different from us in character
and personality.This may be true, but don't be to sure. In a dramatic
piece of research, Philip Zimbardo and his students created a
simulated prison in the basement of the Psychology Department at
Stanford University. Into this "prison" he brought a group of normal,
mature, stable, intelligent young men. By flipping a coin, Zimbardo
designated one-half of them prisoners and one-half of them guards, and
they lived as such for several days. What happened? Let's allow
Zimbardo to tell us in his own words:
At the end of only six days we had to close down our mock prison
because what we saw was frightening. It was no longer apparent to us
or most of the subjects where they ended and their roles began. The
majority had indeed become "prisoners" or "guards," no longer able to
clearly differentiate between role-playing and self. There were
dramatic changes in virtually every aspect of their behaviors,
thinking and feeling. In less than a week, the experience of
imprisonment undid (temporarily) a lifetime of learning; Human values
were suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most
base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified
because we saw some boys ("guards") treat other boys as if they were
despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty, while other boys
("prisoners") became servile, dehumanized robots who thought only of
escape, of their own individual survival, and of their mounting hatred
of the guards.
The Social Animal - Elliot Aronson
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0716733129/
Philip G. Zimbardo conducted...an experiment conducted in 1971 to
study the social psychology of imprisonment....they enlisted
undergraduate men as volunteers in a simulation of prison life, in
which each would play the part of a guard or a prisoner. All
volunteers were interviewed and given personality tests; twenty one
middle class whites were selected after being rated emotionally
stable, mature, and law abiding. By the flip of a coin, ten were
designated as prisoners, eleven as guards, for the duration of a two
week experiment.The "prisoners" were "arrested" by police one quiet
Sunday morning, handcuffed, booked at the police station, taken to the
"prison" (a set of cells built in the basement of the Sanford
psychology building), and there stripped, searched, deloused, and
issued uniforms. The guards were supplied with billy clubs, handcuffs,
whistles, and keys to the cells; they were told that their job was to
maintain "law and order" in the prison and that they could devise
their own methods of prisoner control. The warden (a colleague of
Zimbardo's) and guards drew up a list of sixteen rules the prisoners
had to obey: they were to be silent at meals, rest periods, and after
lights out; they were to eat at meal times but no other time; they
were to address one another by their ID number and any guard as Mr.
Correctional Officer, and so on. Violation of any rule could result in
punishment.
The relations between guards and prisoners quickly assumed a classic
pattern: the guards began to think of the prisoners as inferior and
dangerous, the prisoners to view the guards as bullies and sadists. As
one guard reported:I was surprised at myself . . . I made them call
each other names and clean out the toilets with their bare hands. I
practically considered the prisoners cattle, and I kept thinking I
have to watch out for them in case they try something.In a few days
the prisoners organized a rebellion. They tore off their ID numbers
and barricaded themselves inside their cells by shoving beds against
the doors. The guards sprayed them with a fire extinguisher to drive
them back from the doors, burst into their cells, stripped them, took
away their beds, and in general thoroughly intimidated them.The
guards, from that point on, kept making up additional rules, waking
the prisoners frequently at night for head counts, forcing them to
perform tedious and useless tasks, and punishing them for
"infractions." The prisoners, humiliated, became obsessed by the
unfairness of their treatment. Some grew disturbed, one so much so
that by the fifth day the experimenters began to consider releasing
him before the end of the experiment.The rapid development of sadism
in the guards was exemplified by the comments of one of them who,
before the experiment, said that he was a pacifist, was nonaggressive,
and could not imagine himself maltreating another person. By the fifth
day he noted in his diary:
I have signaled him [one prisoner] out for special abuse both because
he begs for it and because I simply don't like him . . . The new
prisoner (416) refuses to eat his sausage . . . I decided to force
him, but he wouldn't eat. I let the food slide down his face. I didn't
believe it was me doing it. I hated myself for making him eat but I
hated him more for not eating.
Zimbardo and his collegues had not expected so rapid a transformation
in either group of volunteers and later wrote in a report:
What was most surprising about the outcome of this simulated prison
experience was the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited
from quite normal young men, and the contagious spread of their
emotional pathology among those carefully selected precisely for their
emotional stability.On the sixth day the researchers abruptly
terminated the experiment for the good of all concerned. They felt,
however, that it had been valuable; it had shown how easily "normal,
healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under
the institutional pressures of a 'prison environment.' "That finding
may have been important, but in the eyes of many ethicists the
experiment was grossly unethical. It had imposed on its volunteers
physical and emotional stresses that they had not anticipated or
agreed to undergo. [But isn't this what happens to people when they
really go to prison?] In doing so, it had violated the principle,
affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1914, the "every human being of adult
years and of sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done
with his body."
The Story of Psychology -Morton Hunt
http://www.amazon.com/Story-Psychology-Morton-Hunt/dp/0385471491
http://www.prisonexp.org/
http://www.lucifereffect.com/about_preface.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/1400064112