What Brings Out The Worst Of Good People?

In the Stanford prison experiment, Zimbardo analyzes how human behavior can change based one’s surroundings and what they are told to do. Normal college students are given roles to play in a mock prison. In this experiment, people are assigned jobs as prison guards and prisoners. The prison guards quickly adapted to their roles. They saw no problem treating the prisoners with no respect. These students use violence against the other students to show their leadership and dominance. The prisoners quickly got accustomed to their parts as well.The prisoners believed that they deserved the punishment. “The experiment shows that good people under the wrong circumstances can behave just like those that we vilify” (Zimbardo). With this experiment, Zimbardo studies the Lucifer Effect. The Lucifer Effect is understanding how good people become evil. He uses his data from this experiment to further develop the Lucifer Effect theory and find out why the Nazis treated the Jews with such cruelty. His results show that when given the opportunity and in the right environment, humans will dehumanize other

In the first case study digital pictures from the Abu Ghraib Prison from the night shift that was made up of United State Military Police Army Reservists that were not fully trained nor prepared for this type of assignment. However given they were placed in power over the prisoners they started to mentally abuse them thereby crossing the line between good and evil. Another case study he spoke of was one that involved a teacher, a learner, and a person of authority the test leader. In this case study the teacher was to teach the learner a piece of material and then ask questions about the material. If the learner answered incorrectly then the teacher would administer a 15 volt shock, Zimbardo points out that evil starts small, for each incorrect answer the voltage would increase up to 450 volts. Once the learner started to really feel the shocks they would beg the teacher to stop, at this point the teacher would ask the authority figure if they could stop and the authority figure would reply no keep going. The teacher would express concern for the well-being and that they did not want to be responsible for anything that could happen. This is when the authority figure would accept all responsibility and instruct the teacher to continue. 66 percent of the teachers went all the way to 450 volts despite the begging of the learner to stop. Both of these case studies shows that when given power over someone with the

In “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak informs the reader of the situation United States guards caused against Iraqi detainees. Under Bush’s presidency, United States soldiers brought physical abuse and humiliation upon the Abu Ghraib Prison. Szegedy-Maszak briefly analyzes the situation and compares the abuse to further scientific experiments in which test obedience. One of the experiments was the topic of another article titled, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” written by Philip G. Zimbardo. In his work, Zimbardo discusses the experiment he held at Stanford University. A group of male students from the university were paid to participate in an experiment held in a mock prison. Half of the group

citizens, but it was the researchers afterwards that contributed the most startling idea. Zimbardo, the same man who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment, said in an interview with the New York Times, “Prisons tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards’ base impulses. It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches” (Swhwartz, 2004 p. 2). A professor of Law at Loyola University, Marcy Strauss, studies criminal procedure and wrote a forty-two page manuscript on the lessons that should be discussed beyond news articles. Strauss said of Abu Ghraib, “Undoubtedly, these factors [poor training of guards, poor oversight and horrendous conditions] played a major role in facilitating the abuse. Correcting these conditions is imperative. But, to end the introspection there would be a mistake” (Strauss, 2005 p.9). The idea that people could be malignant under specific circumstances has been proven by Milgrams’ studies and this idea is now apparent in real life. Thus, the concern for prisons, as pointed out by both Zimbardo and Strauss, cannot simply be that the guards or correctional officers do not abuse people in the future. The issue is that the maltreatment and indignity in Abu Ghraib was a result of the poor foundation of the U.S. correctional system (Strauss,

In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.

In this paper I will illustrate how the lessons learned from the Stanford Experiment apply to understanding the dynamics of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. The Stanford Experiment demonstrates how social influence can persuade one’s behavior and shape their conformity. The experiment and the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib exemplify the power of authority by utilizing their positions and uniforms to control and overrule the prisoners.

She begins recounting the notorious details, how innocent college students labeled prisoners and guards displayed psychological abuse after only six days of confinement, and makes reference to Stanley Milgram’s obedience study and Abu Ghraib, where similar maltreatment, perceived or real, was conducted on civilians by civilians. She addresses and refutes the accepted belief that the Stanford Prison Experiment proved that anyone could become a tyrant when given or instructed by a source of authority. Instead, she suggests that Zimbardo’s inquiry points toward but does not land on one exact conclusion. She explains the influence of the setting, the presentation of the roles, Zimbardo’s participation, and perhaps a sense of expectation felt, all of which can be reflected in the shocking behavior of a few guards. She argues that it should not have been so shocking. Konnikova discredits the neutrality of Zimbardo’s experiment by insisting that people who would respond to an ad for a psychological study of prison life were not “normal” people. However, with her diction and choice of evidence she displaces the study's culpability in a way that ultimately blurs and undermines her claim.

In most of the countries, there will always be two types of people: people with power, which are people that have more hierarchy than others and that will tend to have some type of power so they can make others do what they want in order to please them; and people that will do anything in order to obey the orders of those with power. When someone has some or a lot of power, eventually, they will only care for their power to increase; it is not a matter of culture, religion, ethnicity or any other aspect that some individuals may have. A few examples of this could be whenever someone obeys another person because they are eternally grateful to them, or just because they have some type of respect towards that person, finally it could be just to

When the amount of people being sent to prison increased, the army couldn’t keep up with rising numbers. “There was- when I left, there was over 900 inmates. There was only five soldiers plus two non-commissioned officers in charge for those 900- over 900 inmates” said Sgt. Frederick (60 Minutes, Abuse at Abu Ghraib). For every guard there is roughly 128 prisoners. At most United States prisons, it is supposed to be for every guard there is five inmates. When 60 minutes interviewed Sgt. Frederick, he was asked about the treatment of prisoners. "We learned a little bit of Arabic, basic commands. And they didn't want to listen, so sometimes, you would just give them a little nudge or something like that just to get them to cooperate so we could get the mission accomplished" answered Sgt. Frederick (Abuse at Abu Ghraib). Soldiers in Abu Ghraib reported that they needed to sometimes “get rough” with the inmates in order to remain in control and make sure the prisoners listened to them (60 Minutes, Abuse at Abu Ghraib). In the end one of the biggest causes of the scandal was lack of training and how understaffed the prison

The prison gained international notoriety after Amnesty International published reports of abuses such as rape, murder and sodomy. According to an article written by, The Newyorker called, Chain of command, Soldiers such as, Charles Graner and Lynndie England, were sentenced to years in prison. They were charged for a series of human rights violations such as, aggravated assault and battery, and malnutrition. It is said that they committed more violations, but it can’t be proven. In the Abu Ghraib prison, detainees were constantly beaten and humiliated, they were stripped naked and put on leashes forced to crawl around like a dog for hours at a

There are different types of people in the world, as they all have different behavior, personality, and culture. Everyone has a different view of what makes good people do bad things. It is amazing how such calm and nice people turn into such a bad people. There must be a psychology reason in order for them to turn like this. There are some factors I would like to know and also discuss of why people behave this way. Therefore, a person with different behavior makes them act different and hence, that impacts on a person’s personality which makes them turn from good person to bad person.

Zimbardo Speaks: The Lucifer Effect and the Psychology of Evil is a lecture all about what makes people evil. This video is powerful to watch; yet it can be disturbing at times. I felt like all of the points that Zimbardo made throughout his presentation have a deep, powerful message that brings together a sense of connection with the readings for this chapter of our class.

Good people can cause severe harm if their motives are influenced by the values shared in a public corporation or are a result of manipulation controlled by the law. Bob Henderson’s ability to satisfy his interests to obtain success by dismissing social responsibility and contributing to the rise in obesity is wrong. Hannah Arendt founded the theory “The banality evil’ through analyzing Adolf Eichmann’s case during the time of the Holocaust. Eichmann and Henderson share similarities of both being ordinary men who influenced large scale harm. The intent of this essay will be to compare and contrast the perception of evil and discuss at which point radical evil may be mistaken for banal evil.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Every indivdual has the decision between good and evil. Not every person will choose the right side of the line. When an indivdual crosses over the line to the evil side this is known as The Lucifer Effect. Philip Zimbardo, the individual that coined the idea, presented the ideas behind why people change and turn evil even if though their whole life they were not known as an evil person. According to Zimbardo, people turn evil for one of two reasons; The Lucifer Effect and the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil (TED Talks).

The Lucifer effect describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action and it explains how the good people do bad or evil thing. Philip Zimbardo used dis-positional , situational and systemic to answer the question “ How do psychologists understand such transformations of Human Characteristic?” (Philip G. Zimbardo, 2007)