Monday 18 October 2010

Why ordinary people do evil...or do good?

Watch also a very interesting talk of Philip Zimbardo and comment on it.

5 comments:

  1. Ordinary people do evil because, like Philip Zimbardo said, they need power and evil is about power.

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  2. You can say people do evil because “they need power and evil is about power ”, but its only the part of making evil things. If it would be true, then everyone will do bad things. Even in the ghettos (I mean this in USA) are people who are doing good things. This video got me thinking. It means everyone is capable to do horrible things like the guards did. All you need is social opinion and beliefs its ok, or some authority who say so. But it suggest that people are like stupid monkeys with no brain and morality.

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  3. I don't have opinion on this post. This film is to long for me. It is boring and i am not interested in this topic. And this man who is talking without beliefs. Very boring and not interested.

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  4. I have seen before the movie from the experiment - it was quite shocking but it reveals that theory that "our point of view depend of our point of sitting" (I'm not sure that I translated it correctly:)) is true. If we turned the situation and changed the roles of participants it's very likely that the effect would be pretty the same (of course if we could erase earlier experience). That's our nature, only people with high level of self-control could resist the pressure of their role - probably they would resign doing that, other way they wouldn't do their task. Even Zimbardo fell down the trap of his role of "prison supervisor" and was keeping the experiment continued although the situations had stopped to be humanitarian long before.

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  5. In my opinion - even for once - everyone should have a moment when he feels like a powerless victim, only sitautaion like that teach real empathy.

    Also I agree that feeling of anonymity makes people much more cruel - you can see it when surfing the web.

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