This is true not only for perpetrators of torture and other horrible acts, but for people who commit a more common kind of wrong-the wrong of taking no action when action is called for. Some people are on the good side only because situations have never coerced or seduced them to cross over. But the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies revealed the permeability of that line. We all like to think that the line between good and evil is impermeable-that people who do terrible things, such as commit murder, treason, or kidnapping, are on the evil side of this line, and the rest of us could never cross it. The majority of teachers delivered the maximum shock of 450 volts.įrom the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being. Pressed by the experimenters-serious looking men in lab coats, who said they’d assume responsibility for the consequences-most participants did not stop administering shocks until they reached 300 volts or above-already in the lethal range. As the learners failed more and more, the teachers were instructed to increase the voltage intensity of the shocks-even when the learners started screaming, pleading to have the shocks stop, and eventually stopped responding altogether.
The participants were not aware that the learner was working with the experimenters and did not actually receive any shocks. The Milgram experiments asked participants to play the role of a “teacher,” who was responsible for administering electric shocks to a “learner” when the learner failed to answer test questions correctly. In addition to the Stanford Prison Experiment, studies conducted in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram at Yale University also revealed the banality of evil. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the “banality of evil” -that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. The experiment, scheduled to last two weeks, ended abruptly after six days.Īs we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Interestingly, even the experimenters were so caught up in the drama that they lost objectivity, only terminating the out-of-control study when an objective outsider stepped in, reminding them of their duty to treat the participants humanely and ethically. Each group rapidly took on the behaviors associated with their role, not because of any particular internal predisposition or instructions from the experimenters, but rather because the situation itself so powerfully called for the two groups to assume their new identities.
After a prisoner rebellion on the second day of the experiment, the guards began using increasingly degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners became more and more passive. But within a matter of hours, what had been intended as a controlled experiment in human behavior took on a disturbing life of its own. The idea was to study the psychology of imprisonment-to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place. Many of the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment didn't speak out when they witnessed abuse by their fellow guards nearly 30 years later, guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq acted in nearly the same way.
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