What’s the Formula for Evil?

So, I’ve been reading this book (halfway through it as of this writing) - The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It’s a rather heavy read, almost like a college psychology textbook, but I love heavy reads once in a while. The book was written by Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychology professor who conducted the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment back in the ’70s. He took a group of normal, healthy (physically, mentally and emotionally) male college students and placed them in a makeshift prison at the basement of Stanford University. Half were randomly assigned as prisoners and the other half as guards.

The objective of the study was to see how the students would react in an environment alien to them (none of them have been imprisoned before and none of them have been jailguards before). The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but about three prisoners already mentally and emotionally broke down by the end of the first week. On the other hand, in a matter of less than seven days, the guards became more and more aggressive toward the prisoners. The experiment was cut short because it was getting out of hand - almost all of them, guards and prisoners alike, forgot that it was just an experiment. They have immersed themselves in the role so deeply that it had altered their behavior.

By reading this book, I began to see ‘evil’ in a different light. We often see evil in a dispositional aspect, meaning we believe that people who do evil acts are innately evil and we could not possibly do those things in any given situation. But Zimbardo offers another explanation for evil acts - situational forces. All of us, even what you may consider good people, have the potential to be ‘evil,’ given the appropriate situational forces. These refer to outside factors that enable, trigger or force someone to do evil things - it could be peer pressure, fear of rejection, authoritative pressure or what have you. Sometimes, it’s the situation that makes a person evil, not because he is innately evil.

With Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, he proved the power of situational forces through the guards who - before the experiment were normal college guys, some claiming that they are more or less compassionate, love animals and love helping people - were turned into creatively sadistic people, seeing the prisoners as ‘cattle,’ as one guard had put it, and not as human beings. It’s being in the prison situation that made them aggressive and sadistic because they were not any of those before the study commenced. Although in a normal setting, they would never mentally torture a human being, it’s their situation that made them do those things.

However, I agree with the author that although situational forces explain why some evil acts are done by rather normal or good people, they are certainly not justification for the evil acts. The doers are still and must be accountable for what they have done. Being aware of situational forces definitely made me see criminals and people who have done me wrong in a different perspective. It made me understand more why they did the things they did. All my life, I have always looked at them in a dispositional way, that they are innately evil, but now, maybe some of them aren’t after all. I’m the type of person who wants to believe that people are innately good. So, what’s the formula for evil? Me thinks it’s the situational forces most of the time. What do you think?