What human minds do

By Stacey DeFever, On-Line Forty-Niner

Wednesday, September 23, 1998

It is relatively easy to force "good" people to engage in "evil" behavior by blocking their self awareness and giving them an avenue for diffusion of responsibility, said Dr. Philip Zimbardo, an award-winning psychologist from Stanford University.

Zimbardo presented his studies at Cal State Long Beach on "The Psychology of Evil: Transforming Ordinary People into Evil Machines" Thursday and Friday in PSY-150.

"We are born with a template to do anything that any human has ever done," Zimbardo said. "Any behavior I witness, I am capable of. I could be Mother Teresa."

Evil behavior is not determined by who a person is, but by the slightest change in one's social context, he said.

More common is the belief that certain individuals are born with an evil or morbid personality, but according to Zimbardo, most crimes are committed by ordinary people.

Zimbardo has been part of numerous studies conducted by social psychologists attempting to see what it would take to push an ordinary person over the edge.

In one of his classes at Stanford, Zimbardo created a scenario in which a man was sentenced to death. He asked for eight volunteers to be on the firing squad. Only two students raised their hands. Needing more people, he informed them that only one of the guns would be loaded. Many more students volunteered after this statement.

He described this as "diffusion of responsibility." All that was needed to convince his students was the agreement that they would not be responsible for the man's death.

In his famous Stanford experiment, which was featured on "60 Minutes" in August, Zimbardo took male college students, stripped them of their identities and provided them with new ones. Half of the students in the experiment were given prison guard identities and the rest were given that of prisoners.

The "guards" set up a fake prison, went out and bought their own uniforms, and forcefully arrested the soon-to-be prisoners. Without any other instruction, the guards booked and locked up their "prisoners." Zimbardo was forced to end the experiment days early because of the amount of force, punishment and dehumanization of the "prisoners" exhibited by the "guards."

With the change in only their clothing and social position, in Zimbardo's experiment men of similar backgrounds crossed the line from good to evil.

According to Zimbardo, in another experiment done by a professor at Yale, more than two-thirds of those studied were willing to harm another human when granted anonymity.

In this experiment, an actor was seated in a room and participants were told by another actor in a white lab coat to punish the man if he answered a question wrong or was slow to respond. Every time they pushed a button, they were told that an electrical current would shock the man. Every time, they were told to increase the intensity of the current.

Many participants did not know how to respond to or escape the situation. Societally-enduced codes of behavior forced them into completing the experiment, Zimbardo said. The situation was created with set rules administered by figures of authority. Even when the participants heard the man scream and watched him writhe in pain, they did not stop. Not one person got out of their seat to aid.

This experiment was done 19 times with a variety of people and the results were consistent.