The Lucifer Experiment
1:19 PM | BY ZeroDivide
EDIT
1.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and was written as a study by Philip Zimbardo after conducting an experiment where he used students as "prison guards" and other students as "prisoners" after only six days the experiment had to be stopped because of how brutal the would-be prison guards (students, mind you) had become.
As I have not delved fully into the book, or the study itself held at Stanford I will say that if a person is focusing only on the lower aspects of existence and becomes convinced that there is only evil and embraces that paradigm as their own "reality" then sure it would work. I wonder though if the "guards" were simply manifesting what they thought a "guard" should be, like taking what they know from the un-reality of popular media. I think it would have gone very different if they did not use all male guards (they did) and chose people from different cultures and social standing (these were all Stanford students). Regardless history is replete with many more examples where people spontaneously act with kindness and compassion. Consider the Japanese after their quake. Consider the world coming together for Haiti after their quake (I was there doing humanitarian work, and there were amazing things happening). Sure there are some douche bags, and you know what, sometimes I'm one of them - but not all the time. Hope this didn't muddy the water too much.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and was written as a study by Philip Zimbardo after conducting an experiment where he used students as "prison guards" and other students as "prisoners" after only six days the experiment had to be stopped because of how brutal the would-be prison guards (students, mind you) had become.
As I have not delved fully into the book, or the study itself held at Stanford I will say that if a person is focusing only on the lower aspects of existence and becomes convinced that there is only evil and embraces that paradigm as their own "reality" then sure it would work. I wonder though if the "guards" were simply manifesting what they thought a "guard" should be, like taking what they know from the un-reality of popular media. I think it would have gone very different if they did not use all male guards (they did) and chose people from different cultures and social standing (these were all Stanford students). Regardless history is replete with many more examples where people spontaneously act with kindness and compassion. Consider the Japanese after their quake. Consider the world coming together for Haiti after their quake (I was there doing humanitarian work, and there were amazing things happening). Sure there are some douche bags, and you know what, sometimes I'm one of them - but not all the time. Hope this didn't muddy the water too much.