This Is Not News

I’ve talked about Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments on the site before. Another oft-cited set of observations into the effects of authority on human behavior came from the Standford prison experiment of the 1970s, in which subjects quickly descended to a level of cruelty unexpected by the experimenters – and the experimenters were so captivated by what they were seeing that they let the experiment continue. Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who organized the experiment, has written a book and set up a web site devoted to what he calls the Lucifer Effect – the process by which our surroundings influence us to commit evil actions. Zimbardo applies the insights from the Stanford experiment and his subsequent work to current situations, including the Abu Ghraib scandal. (Zimbardo acted as an expert witness in one of the court-martials.) He also has an essay on the Web discussing the Milgram experiments. I’m giving serious thought to incorporating the book into some of my moral philosophy courses, but for now, the website provides a lot of material worth looking through.