Research Report

Internal 91105
Oliver Price-Walker
2019

Oliver Price-Walker
2019
 Table of Contents

Inquiry Framing 2

Question 1 3

Question 2 4

Question 3 5

Conclusion 7

Note Taking Tables 8

Bibliography 13

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 Inquiry Framing
Hypothesis: Humans are not born to be evil but learn it through their experiences and outside influences while
growing up.

This research report is an investigation into the popular nature vs nurture debate. It is an exploration into what
makes human evil and whether or not it is genetically inherited or can be learned through experiences that
children are exposed to as they grow up. This report idea stemmed from an online BBC Earth article titled “Are
we born good or evil?” which was written by Tom Aglietti and published on December 21, 2018.

The article explores the idea of whether or not children have an idea of what is good or bad behaviour or if
that moral compass is learned. The article states that this idea has been debated throughout the years by
philosophers, people like Thomas Hobbs who suggest that humans are “brutish” whilst Jean-Jacques Rousseau
feels that man would be pure without the evils of society.

The article then explores this idea by referencing an earlier experiment in which a number of young babies are
shown a puppet show with an obviously bad and an obviously good character; the children are then asked to
choose a character they preferred. The results are, most children actually chose the “good” character over the
bad.

I found this study extremely interesting, thus why I chose this as a research report topic, as I wish to
investigate this topic more. These are the three questions I felt have best represented what I aim to
investigate:

1) How susceptible are we to outside influence biologically from conception to childhood?

2) How susceptible are we to outside and social influences as adolescents?
3) How susceptible are we to moral change under pressure as adults? How easy is it to change the
person we are?

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 How susceptible are we to outside influence biologically from birth and childhood?

From birth we know that children and young babies begin to learn everything they possibly can about the
world, they begin to suck on objects in order to determine textures and tastes, they copy sound made by
adults and eventually begin to crawl and walk like them. This is possibly the most important part of a child’s
learning as it is where they begin to learn about the world around them and are at their most susceptible to
outside influence.

A study called foetal origins emerged around two decades ago and explores the possibility that young babies
might do some of their most substantial learning whilst they are still in the womb (Murphy Paul 2011). One of
the first things that foetuses begin to explore is the sound of their mother’s voice. As it is the first thing they
hear this is one of the main ways that a foetus gets emotionally attached to its mother, certain studies
(DeCasper 1986) have shown that even the youngest of children prefer the sound of their birth mother’s voice
to anyone else. However, mothers can also pass other things on to their children. As a foetus grows, it is
constantly studying how their mother eats, drinks speaks and acts through the womb in order to best adapt
itself for the kind of environment that it will be going into. If a mother was pregnant during a famine, studies
have shown (LH Lumey 2007) that after the children have grown up, they would have a lot more problems
later in life to do with low cholesterol, high blood pressure and obesity than children who were not foetuses
during a famine. This is because as the mother is pregnant, the foetus is taking note of how little the mother is
eating and in order to best prepare itself for the coming environment and adjusting the body in order to best
suit it, this is reinforced by Annie Murphy Paul in her TED talk on the subject, “Much of what a pregnant
woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals
she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her foetus”.

This actually, potentially, could have a lot to do with a child’s view on morality and how they grow up. See, a
foetus is best preparing itself to an environment in order to survive as efficiently as possible, and this can apply
to cultures. Although a foetus’s physicality is altered to the environment through how the mother eats, it can
be affected mentally through how the mother speaks. It may not understand exactly what she is saying, but
things like the dynamics she uses, whether she’s consistently shouting or whispering, the emotions she is
conveying, whether she’s consistently angry or sad or even the words she uses, whether she’s consistently
using expletives could have an effect on the baby’s mentality. If a mother is consistently sounding angry or
rough and shouting a lot, then this is most likely the emotion that the child may identify the most with.
Whether or not she uses many expletives, this could have an effect on the language that the child uses the
most. This, of course, doesn’t just happen in the foetus, but that is when a baby gets the first impression of
their mother, and first impressions are said to be the most important.

There is, in fact, some evidence to support that children may actually have a mild concept of good and evil. A
study shown on the BBC show “Babies: Their Wonderful World” showed a variety of children, some as young
as 6 months, being shown a small puppet show. The puppet show involved a red circle trying to get up a hill,
whilst a blue square representing “evil” keeps pushing it down. A yellow triangle then helps the circle by
attempting to push it up the hill. The babies were then offered both puppets, and most of the children
preferred to take the yellow triangle rather than the square.

Whilst Simple, this study could prove that babies begin life with a basic concept of right and wrong. This could
be because as survival is the key primal instinct installed in them, they are driven to associate with the yellow
triangle over the blue square for their own personal gain as in survival we would rather ally ourselves with
someone who would support and help us, rather than hinder us.

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 How susceptible are we to outside and social influences as Adolescents?

Adolescence can be a difficult time for young adults as this is the period where the brain is possibly at its most
susceptible.

During the adolescent period, ages 13 to 19, the brain begins to go through a “remodelling phase” . A child’s
brain will have done most of the important growth that is needed by the time they are six, however this is still
not a final, fully functioning brain. The brain begins to go through and remove some of the unused connections
in the grey matter in order to become more efficient. These connections will include the removal of skills that
a child has not used in a long time, and thus probably will not need in their adult life. This “pruning” begins at
the back of the brain when the child is around 13, or whenever they begin to go through puberty. The last part
of the brain to be “remodelled” is at the front, the prefrontal cortex, and this is what we are focusing on.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is used in complex cognitive behaviour (Dahlitz 2017). It sits
right at the front of the brain, under the forehead. This is where most of our thoughts take place, which means
that it is used for personality expression, rule learning, decision making, the controlling of impulses, and the
moderation of social behaviour. It is the part that keeps us in check socially, tapping into the same primal
instinct that we use when we are a foetus or a young child and are preparing to learn as much as possible in
order to best fit in and to be prepared for the world around us. The prefrontal cortex controls how we act in
certain situations through adapting how we present ourselves, the decisions we make and decides how best
we can fit in, either with positive, or negative results.

However, as teenagers, especially men, do not tend to have a fully developed pre-frontal cortex until they are
at least 19, 25 in some cases, means that they are much less incapable of making the right kind of decisions,
especially when under social pressure. As the prefrontal cortex is developed last, this means that it still in the
“learning and adapting” phase from childhood. Thus, teenagers may find themselves seemingly changing
personalities for each social situation as they have not fully decided on who they want to be, making them
very easy to influence in certain ways.

These outer influences can come in all forms, there have been many arguments over the years on whether or
not videogames have put this kind of stress on your child (Wenner Moyer 2018), especially when violent acts
have been taken by children who have played violent, age-restricted videogames when they are too young.
One example is the story of Nathon Brooks, who shot both of his parents as they slept (they survived) because
they took away his games console. When children play games that are designed for adults, the prefrontal
cortex may subconsciously confuse the socially acceptable behaviour in the game with socially acceptable
behaviour in real life.

However, I want to focus on peer pressure. As teenagers, one of the most important influences on us is those
of our friends and peers. Because of the aforementioned undeveloped prefrontal lobe our need to be socially
accepted is heightened, thus if we are put in a situation where we are required to make a decision, for
example, whether or not to drink alcohol, teens are reportedly six times more likely to go with the majority, in
this case, to have a drink, as shown through a study at Columbia University.

This shows that adolescents are especially more likely to be influenced in a social situation than otherwise. A
child may not originally be violent, a rule breaker or “evil”; however, the likelihood of them making decisions
that they would not usually make is increased under social influences.

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 How susceptible are we to moral change under pressure as adults?

Once we have passed adolescence and taken the step into adulthood, it has become a societal perception that
we, as humans, have become the person that we will continue to be for the rest of our lives. However, as
cemented in ourselves as we might be, if, under certain circumstances, it may be possible for adults to
succumb to moral changes. In order to explore this, I have investigated the Stanford prison experiment and the
Milgram experiment.

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological experiment headed by Dr Philip Zimbardo that
investigated how willingly, and quickly young men would conform to a situation that they are put in through
roles or instructions they are assigned to by an authority figure. This study took place from the 14 Aug 1971 to
the 20 Aug 1971. I have discussed conformity and its forms in my other two questions, especially the human
need for it. A foetus and young child are learning as much as they can in order to conform to the environment,
they will grow up to live in, and an adolescent is more likely to conform to their social surroundings in order to
put in practice what they have learnt growing up. Zimbardo’s experiment has decided to put this to the test.

The experiment consisted of picking up 24 college students that had volunteered to take part in the
experiment, and conduct a fake arrest of 12 of them, randomly selected, these 12 were the prisoners. The
prisoners were taken to a makeshift prison in the corridor of the basement of Stanford University’s psychology
department, systematically searched, stripped naked, and given a uniform, this was designed as a humiliation
tactic for the prisoners as is the principal in real prisons. Each prisoner was then issued an identical uniform, an
ID number and a ball and chain bolted onto their ankles; this was in order to make the prisoners feel
anonymous. This, along with the fact that the prisoner was only ever referred to by their number rather than
their name completely minimised their individuality and aided in making them comply to the guards. The other
half of the university students were to become guards; they were given a set of rules on what they could and
couldn’t do and were briefed of the seriousness of their job. The guards were in charge of harassing the
prisoners, breaching their privacy, giving them an inadequate diet, and violating their civil rights. The guards
were made to believe that they were not apart of the experiment. However, each one of them was given
identical uniforms, truncheons and mirrored glasses. This gave the guards a sense of anonymity, a new type of
power. The guards were given shifts in which to look after the prisoners and assert their authority. They did
this by waking the prisoners in the middle of the night and giving them “counts” a process which required
them to rattle off their ID numbers; they also gave the prisoners physical punishments in the form of push-ups
and jumping jacks.

By the second day, there was already a rebellion. The prisoners had revolted by barricading themselves into
their cells and taunting the guards, the guards responded by breaking in, stripping them naked and forcing the
ringleaders into solitary confinement, a small cupboard nicknamed “the hole”. They also took away
“privileges” from the worst prisoners; these “privileges” included meals, beds and sanitary products. There
were a number of other instances like this over the next few days; however, after 36 hours, one prisoner was
released. Prisoner #8612 had been apparently suffering from disturbance and were noticeably emotionally
unstable.

The planned fortnight prion simulation was called off after six days. This was because the guards were slowly
becoming more and more abusive to the prisoners, and the prisoners were becoming more and more
compliant and were refusing to resist. Any prisoner who tried to resist didn’t just end up being punished by the
guards, but also shunned by their fellow prisoners and labelled as a troublemaker. By this time, the morality of
the experiment was also being questioned.

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The Milgram experiment is an investigation conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1963 to investigate how willing
normal, everyday people, comply to the instructions of an authority figure that may contradict their moral
beliefs.

Milgram, like Zimbardo, put out an advertisement in the local paper, and brought in volunteers, these
volunteers were told that they would be randomly sorted into two roles, the role of the teacher and the role of
the leaner. However, what these participants did not know that this was rigged and that when they were
chosen, the other person was actually an actor, and would always be the learner. The learner would then go
behind a screen into the next room and would be hooked up to a chair, and the teacher would sit at a desk
which had an array of buttons on it, symbolising the strength of electric shocks. The teacher would then,
surveyed by an experimenter, ask the learner a number of questions, and if they got them wrong, the teacher
would send through a shock via the buttons slowly increasing. Of course, there was no actual shock for the
learner, but they would react as if there was. If the learner protested the more dangerous the shock was, the
experimenter would respond with one of four responses, telling them that the experiment requires them to
continue. The experiment would end once the teacher has pretested more than four times, or they have
reached the highest shock point, and the learner is no longer responsive.

The reason that the Milgram experiment is so disturbing is the fact that 65% of teachers continued to shock
the learners up to the highest level, despite the fact that the original prediction was 3 out of 100. All of the
participants continued up to 300 volts. In some versions of the experiment the learner stated that he had heart
conditions, and in all of the experiments the learner became increasingly more agitated and started to bang on
the wall and plead to be released at 300 volts, and after that, would refuse to answer the questions, which was
treated as an incorrect answer. As stated by Milgram himself “Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and
without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.”

The reason that I have chosen to focus on the Stanford prison experiment Milgram experiment is because they
both focus on the key theme of changing a person and making them do things that they wouldn’t usually do.
Both experiments involve putting the participants into a situation that is potentially uncomfortable or
pressuring, and both the experiments involve supposedly normal people, committing acts of violence and
harassment to another human being in a fairly short space of time.

What both of these experiments prove, is that given the right environment, it is possible for a normal person
to become evil. Both of these experiments granted their subjects anonymity, unaccountability for their actions
and, except for the prisoners, power. What these experiments required of their subjects, was to conform to a
higher authority. The Stanford prison experiment required the guards to conform to test runners, and the
prisoners to conform to the guards, whilst the Milgram experiment required the teachers to conform to the
experimenter. In both situations, all of the subjects conformed, and most of the subjects conformed even
when it went against their moral beliefs. As Dr Zimbardo put it “Evil is the exercise of power.”

Personally, I feel that both the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment are genuinely
excellent insights into the human mind and how it fairs under pressure. However there is some debate on the
reliability of these experiments has been called into questions. The Stanford prison experiment has had
multiple failed recreation attempts, and the Milgram experiment has been tested on modern day people to
very different results. In spite of this, I feel that this is mainly down to the fact that people being tested by
these recreations recognised the type of experiment as they have been very highly publicised, in fact, this was
noted in one of the attempted recreations of the Milgram experiment as quite a few of the teachers suspected
the learner was not getting harmed.

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 Conclusion
Doctor Philip Zimbardo, head of the Stanford prison experiment, discusses the psychology of evil in a TED talk
from 2008. In this, he talks about his book “The Lucifer Effect” which he describes, “The Lucifer effect involves
understanding human character transformations with these three factors… What do the people bring into the
situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that
situation?”. What Dr Zimbardo is saying, is that evil manifests in people through the situations that they are in.
Whatever the person, whoever they are, if you put them in the right situation, something will manifest, and
whether it is good or evil depends on the situation.

I feel Dr Zimbardo is also telling us to look for where we are going wrong in society, what is it in what we are
doing that causes some people to become “bad apples”. Because evil manifests through a situation and how it
affects a person, and every person is different, people are affected in different ways by society.

A child is born to a mother who has been abandoned by the father and is having trouble supporting herself
financially during the pregnancy. The mother is of course distressed, worried about money, and thus is prone
to verbally abusive outbursts, has a short temper and may turn to help in the form of recreational drugs. The
foetus slowly matures, and as it does the first sounds it hears of its mother are rough, loud, harsh and
outspoken. The foetus gets its nourishment from the mother’s poor diet and inherits the mother's drug
addiction. The child is born and begins to mimic the mother even more, taking note of her vocal tones and
frequent language in order to begin to speak. As the child grows up, the mother has more to worry about in
the way of expenses for her child, so her situation gets worse. The child then matures to adolescence and
prefers to mix with a crowd that has traits that he is familiar with. Through the social influences of their peers,
peer pressure and pack mentality the child is subjected to recreational drugs, alcohol and gang violence before
the age of 16. This child then chooses to neglect their schooling and ends up living in a gang environment
facing the same problems as their mother. This child then goes on to commit numerous crimes, violence,
domestic abuse, theft etc.

Although possibly a slight exaggeration, this example embodies everything I have discussed could affect
someone to become an “evildoer” or a “bad egg” in today's society. In this example, we see how the child is
affected before and after birth and in adolescence and we also see how the home environment they grew up
in, and the situation that they lived in affected how they lived their life. The child went into the situation a
clean slate, with basic instincts, and the situation they grew up in manifested them into a “bad apple”. And the
situation was a negative environment that the child was exposed to as they grew up. There is a link between a
poor, inappropriate and stressful upbringing for children and possible violence and “evil” tendencies as adults,
it is time for this to be noted, publicly. New Zealand, as a country, has serious problems with domestic abuse
and violent crimes. If we took note of this and made it a priority to properly educate and help those who come
from possible troubled homes, we could see a significant change in this and other social issues.

I believe that humans are not born to be evil but learn it through their experiences and outside influences
while growing up, that evil manifests itself in a person due to the environment that shapes them.

We are not all born to be evil, but given the right situation, we can become evil.

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 Note Taking Tables

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