Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil

<<Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.>>

The world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil. God's favorite angel was Lucifer. Apparently, Lucifer means "the light." It also means "the morning star," in some scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins.

Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil. So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives -- the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are -- leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity.  

Comparing with Prison of Abu Ghraib in Iraq, he was shocked, but not surprised, because he had seen those same visual parallels when he was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study.

The woman (Christina Maslach) who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When he said it got out of control, he was the prison superintendent. He didn't know it was out of control. Philip was totally indifferent. She saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners nor guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." Philip ended the study the next day, the good news is that he married her the next year. 

(A.Estephany)