Zimbardo and Milgram concluded from their studies on obedience that most people would comply to commit atrocities if given the right environment
Philip Zimbardo showed in Stanford Prison Experiment that those designated position as guard would comply to commands to commit cruelties toward prisoners. Zimbardo took a particularly extreme stance as to what these findings mean, namely his “bad barrel” theory—the issue isn’t how a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel; it’s how a bad barrel can turn any apple bad. In another apt metaphor, rather than concentrating on one evil person at a time, what Zimbardo calls a “medical” approach, one must understand how some environments cause epidemics of evil, a “public health” approach. As he states: “Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do—given the same situational forces.” Anyone could potentially be an abusive Milgram teacher, Zimbardo guard, or goose-stepping Nazi.
In a similar vein, Stanley Milgram, who did similar experiments (Stanley Milgram had shown that people would continue to shock someone who missed an answer to a question to deadly levels if ordered to by authority) stated, “If a system of death camps were set up in the US of the sorts we had seen in Nazi Germany one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.” And as stated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, in a quote perpetually cited in this literature, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 529). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️