From good or decent to evil

Well, before I try to answer my last question of how humans can reach communion, let me tell you more of how people become from decent and good to other than that (in Maslow's words).

There is a movie called "The experiment", the first version was released in 2001 a new version was released few weeks ago. It might be interesting to watch it, it is based on a real-life experiment preformed by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in 1971.

Dr. Phillip Zimbardo is a well know psychologist and a Professor emeritus at Stanford University. One of his most famous experiments is the one known by Stanford prison study [1,2 (Parts 6, 7 and 8)].

Stanford prison study was a 6-day experiment exploring how good people can be corrupted by a situation. The participants were volunteer healthy students. A group of them were playing the role of prison guards, who had all the power on a second group of students mocking the prisoners. These students after three days started to "live" their own role, they were not longer ordinary students. After only 36 hours a riot broke out and the guards used fire extinguishers on the prisoners. Punishments scaled up, from doing push-ups to stripping prisoners naked with bagged heads and even worst. Prisoners broke down crying, screaming and being irrational. Guards actions became unpredictable, when guards started to used obscenities, then testosterone raised, in 5 days college students were making other college students horrible sexual things. The experiment initially intended to last for 2 weeks, had to end up on the 6th day.

(Sadly amazed how humans can transform so quickly)


The conclusion of the experiment was that a person's behavior can be more influenced by his/her environment (situational forces in Dr. Zimbardo's words) rather than his/her own human nature. According to Zimbardo we are born neither good nor evil, all people are capable of do both. Moreover, he defines "evil" as:

The exercise of power to intentionally harm psychologically or to hurt physically or to destroy.[video]


Personally, I find the experiment quite disturbing. I do hope this study helps psychologists to understand better human nature and help to heal and/or build better human beings.

After watching all these videos a sea of thoughts came to my mind. On the one hand, we have the quick transformation of the guards, and on the other hand, the damage of the psychological health of the prisoners, which was not really talked about and I wonder which were the posterior effects of of this experiment in every student. Moreover, do a real prisoner can really rehabilitate under similar circumstances? or do they become worst? Previously I mentioned in one of my posts the study of Dorothy Lewis on killers, who observed that most of them had a history of abuse, abuse practiced by their own parents in many cases.

I still have lots of questions ... but for now let me end up this post with following conclusion:


All humans are capable to do evil, and make other people become evil, I do not know what is worst.