(Reaction Paper on Philip Zimbardo’s TED Talk)

People
I perceived good and evil as common dichotomy until I watched Philip Zimbardo’s TED Talk.
How could such evil have been unleashed on the world, and how did it affect the people caught
up in it?

According to Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, an in-depth, nuanced knowledge of evil can

actually be a virtue—such knowledge helps us identify evil more readily and resist it when
necessary.
“Evil comes in many forms,” Zimbardo says, “with various disguises that are vital to understand
before engaging that perennial adversary.”

Zimbardo demonstrated this in the early 1970s when he carried out his infamous Stanford
Prison Experiment. The mock jail he set up in Stanford’s psychology building, where “guards”
abused “prisoners” with impunity, revealed the speed with which ordinary people can begin to
carry out depraved acts in a toxic environment. His insights into what he calls “situational evil”
have helped a variety of organizations take steps to prevent such abuses in the future.

In the prison demonstration, Zimbardo claimed that ordinary people underwent a

transformation. In his book, he calls it The Lucifer Effect, proposing to explain “how good
people turn evil.” Yet the students who participated were recruited for “a psychological study
of prison life.

When people with these types of dark traits signed up for a prison study and became prison
guards, they were surrounded by others who shared their tendencies, and they expressed
them. People “do not automatically assume roles given to them,” conclude the psychologists
Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, after running their own prison experiment
with cooperation from the BBC. Rather, “particular individuals with particular beliefs make
tyranny possible.”

People were more likely to deliver painful shocks if they were authoritarian. The shockers were
also significantly more trusting of others (they assumed the scientist would do the right thing)
and used to following the lead of others (they believed life events were driven by external
forces like luck, chance, or fate, rather than internal forces like effort and willpower).
Bad people are more likely to opt into bad situations. When they band together, all too often,
evil is the result.