The Psychology Of Evil Philip Zimbardo Analysis

The topic in which I have selected is the TED talk given by Philip Zimbardo titled, ‘The Psychology of Evil’. I choose this topic because of my interest in criminal behavior and the psychology behind what makes a person commit crime. Zimbardo started by talking about his theory called the Lucifer effect, which is based around the idea that, “evil is the exercise of power” (Zimbardo, 2008). He then gives examples to explain what he means by this. Zimbardo also talked about Social psychologist’s theory and expands on it with his own knowledge to further backup what he was discussing. He concludes with proposing that every human is capable of being good and evil and that everyone will have to choose a side at some point in their life. Before watching …show more content…
American soldiers abused and mutilated prisoners that were believed to have information that could help the U.S. army. Pictures were revealed of men cut, bleeding, naked, and with bags over their heads along with other horrifying images that make a person wonder how any of this can happen. Zimbardo used these horrific incidents to show that when looking at the reason why people do bad things it is not only in the individual but the entire system. He explains this by saying, “What is the responsible? What could be the who of people, but it could also be the what of the situation, and obviously that’s wrongheaded” (Zimbardo, 2008). What he means by this is that not always is it the individual that is bad, but the situation they are put in by the system that runs them. The soldiers were told to get information out of the prisoners, but were not told how, nor were they watched therefore they did what they felt like to the prisoners to get the information they wanted. This makes me wonder how many times this has happened and why does our system allow for this to happen. It is unnerving to think about innocent people being tortured in various ways, including the soldiers having them simulate fellatio, for information that the prisoners may or may not have. This also connects to police investigations and aggressive interrogation practices to get information or confessions out of a person that may not know anything, but will lie to get out of the situation. Although aggressive interrogation by police is not as aggressive as what happened in Abu Ghraib it has the same idea. Situations like these should have much more repercussions then it currently has and systems should not be blindly allowing these situations to