The Stanford Prison Experiment: The Concept Of “Evil”
Are you really a good person? To what extent do you know yourself and are you aware of your strengths and weaknesses? What do you think would happen if you put a good person in an evil place?
For centuries many people have wondered what the origin of evil is, what makes some people good or bad. We often believe that we are part of that circle of good people with correct moral standards completely different from those who carry out atrocious acts. It is comforting to think that cruelty exists only in those “bad people”, since we thus create a moral distinction that differentiates us from the rest. Comfortable and easy to understand.
But are you really a good person? To what extent do you know yourself and are you aware of your strengths and weaknesses? What do you think would happen if you put a good person in an evil place? Would that place stop being evil, or would that person stop being good? This last question is what Philip Zimbardo intended to answer in his well-known Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment
In August 1971, a selection of 20 participants was made, all students without criminal records and with a stable psychological profile. The roles were distributed randomly, making 9 of inmates and the rest of jailers. The idea was to create a fictitious prison in the basement of the university itself.
On the morning of August 14, they appeared at the participants’ house, detained them with handcuffs and blindfolded them to take them to jail. They stripped them naked, put them in uniforms and a mesh over their heads. Each inmate had an identification number sewn into their uniform and from that moment on they could not be addressed by their names but by their numbers. In this way, a factor of depersonalization: The volunteers were not people with their own identity, they were prisoners.
The guards, for their part, wore authentic uniforms, with batons, handcuffs and reflective sunglasses so that their eyes could not be seen and thus made them more intimidating.
He Stanford prison experiment It was supposed to last two weeks, but on the second day the situation began to get out of control. The jailers abused their roles and resorted to psychological violence, punishments, humiliation and isolation.
With all this, after 36 hours the prisoners began to have emotional crises, every day a different one broke down and had to be taken out of the fictitious prison. On the sixth day, only five of the nine prisoners who began the experiment remained. At this point there were even sexual humiliations and this is when it was decided to end the experiment.
This experiment, which was a traumatic experience for a large part of the volunteers, also provided a new perspective on evil in people, although to do so they had to overcome the barrier of what morally ethical. Evil is not exclusively attributable to a series of people of mean nature but is largely explained by the context.
There are many other examples that reflect the evil of human beings in difficult situations, such as the Abu Ghraib prison, where mistreatment and torture were committed by American soldiers. We can also talk about the horrors of the Nazi death camps, the genocide in the Darfur region, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and many more massacres that have occurred over the centuries.
Suffice it to say that more than fifty million people have been systematically murdered by military and civilian forces willing to comply with the orders to kill decreed by their governments. This is the so-called Blind obedience to authority and it has been proven in a multitude of experiments that people with supposedly correct moral standards are capable of carrying out terrible acts when they are imposed on them, such as in the well-known Milgram experiment.
