Stanley Milgram's Theory Of Dehumanization Essay

Dehumanization Human beings love to search for the meaning behind everything because once meaning is found, then justification and rationalization can be given. Genocide is a very complex term, but the act of genocide itself is unfathomable. People always want a reason for why presidents or dictators allow genocide to happen, and the only option that can make everything clear is that human evil must have developed. Although human evil provides an explanation, there is something true about human evil. Human evil does exist. Every single person is capable of evil and different circumstances test our capacity for evil. Human evil can manifest itself in even the most ordinary person. Stanley Milgram’s experiment illustrated how a once morally right and ordinary human being could commit horrific crimes against another person just because a person of authority told them to. Milgram stated that “few people have the …show more content…
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