Milgram's Psychology: The Psychology Of Evil

The Psychology of Evil What does it mean to be evil? chances are when everyone is growing up ask at one point, what makes someone turn from good into evil? In the lecture we went over one layout of Milgram’s obedience study we went over during a lecture also could help explain what we now think evil is. In This study Milgram tested the obedience of people to see how far they would go on inflicting pain on someone else because someone of authority told them too, which made people wonder if obedience inferred evil.We also went over he Stanford prison experiment in the lecture and many of us wanted to know what made the students, who were playing guards, act so cruel to the other students that where prisoners. We learned that it was not that …show more content…
Jekyll Mr. Hide” scenario. He said that many people think the lone between good and evil was fixed and impermeable, meaning once someone is good they 're safe from evil and once someone is evil they 'll stay evil. However, Zimbardo thinks the line between evil and good can move around and more permeable than people tend to think. He then says what he thinks about the “Lucifer effect” and turns it into a psychological definition of evil. To Zimbardo, evil is the exercise of power, to harm people psychologically, to physically harm, to destroy people mortally or ideas, or to commit crimes against humanity. To support this he brought up the incidents he witnessed at Abu Ghraib and showed the pictures that were taken by the soldiers. The government referred to the soldiers who mistreated the prisoners as “bad apples”, but Zimbardo says that isn 't the question that should be asked because it isn 't the soldiers who are bad, but the situation they were put in. He states how psychologist understand the transformation of human characteristics. The first is the disposition or what is inside the person, or what are they being told to do. The second what is the situation they are put. The last part is the system or the political economic or legal power that influences their actions. In other words if you want to change a person you have to change the situation they are in and if you want to change the situation you have to know where the power is in the situation. He brought up a little comic that he said summed up his talk where a cop says he is not good nor bad just a person, just someone with good or bad traits that emerge depending of the circumstances. He uses Milgram’s obedience experiment that asked people to be either a teacher or