Ordinary college students that were given the role of the guard became engulfed with power and began to torture the students playing the inmates. Hitler and the Nazis even became hungry with power and allowed the Holocaust to expand as much as it did because they became blinded with control. Much like the Holocaust, everything turned hostile when the college students who were playing the guards dehumanized the inmates. This extreme dehumanization rationalizes evil. Waller explains how “extreme measures are justified… the dehumanization of victims even implies that they deserve extreme treatment” (Waller, 2007). Nevertheless, Zimbardo’s experiment illustrated how evil is dependent on the situation. These once ordinary, morally just young men turned evil because of their situational circumstance. To reiterate, everyone is capable of actions that can be defined as evil, which is why this explanation helps people understand that genocide is evil that evolved from a given
Ordinary college students that were given the role of the guard became engulfed with power and began to torture the students playing the inmates. Hitler and the Nazis even became hungry with power and allowed the Holocaust to expand as much as it did because they became blinded with control. Much like the Holocaust, everything turned hostile when the college students who were playing the guards dehumanized the inmates. This extreme dehumanization rationalizes evil. Waller explains how “extreme measures are justified… the dehumanization of victims even implies that they deserve extreme treatment” (Waller, 2007). Nevertheless, Zimbardo’s experiment illustrated how evil is dependent on the situation. These once ordinary, morally just young men turned evil because of their situational circumstance. To reiterate, everyone is capable of actions that can be defined as evil, which is why this explanation helps people understand that genocide is evil that evolved from a given