Just wanted to point out an excellent interview with Philip Zimbardo, the principal researcher of the controversial Stanford Prison Experiment, on the New York Times web site.
If, like me, you couldn't stomach watching the entire video (now removed from YouTube), you should at least watch this 8-minute interview, which also offers a nice summary of the experiment and its relation to Abu Ghraib.
Zimbardo's thesis is that we all have the capacity for good and evil; it's the situations we are put in that cause us to behave in good or evil ways.
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Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, writes today in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the lessons and conduct of that pyschological test.
The conclusion of his updated reflections on the…
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
-- MacBeth Act III, Scene 4, Lines 162-166
I have a book to put on the reading list. Stanford…
The Stanford Prison experiment was a very famous -- now infamous -- experiment in social psychology that was conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford psychology professor. You probably remember him if you took a high school or college intro to psychology course because he made a very…
May's Idiot of the Month Award goes to Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America, for this ridiculous screed in - where else? - the WorldNutDaily. Even by the standards of WND, Knight succeeds brilliantly in making himself sound like a…
Dr. Zimbardo was on the Daily Show the other day as well. The interview is on the show's website. If someone had mentioned to me that one day my research might land me a gig with Jon Stewart, I might have worked a little harder in grad school.
"Zimbardo's thesis is that we all have the capacity for good and evil; it's the situations we are put in that cause us to behave in good or evil ways."
What Phillip Zimbardo is missing in his attempt to explain how things such as Abu Ghraib happen, which ultimately relates to the take over of the US by the Necons and the subsequent total gutting of the Constitution etc, is the presence of psychopaths in power. Research by Robert Hare and Martha Stout place the percentage of psychopaths in the population at 4-6%. Not all are in jail or serial murders, yet these individuals have no conscience and thus rise to power because they don't have the normal feelings that hold the majority of us from stabbing another in the back and lying for our sole benefit. The book 'Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes' by Andrew M. Lobaczewski describes this process in detail.
Here is an article that looks at Zimbardo and psychopaths that is worth reading:
Environment of Evil