About the author
Philip Zimbardo, a famous American psychologist and professor of psychology at Stanford University. Famous for the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, he has published popular series of textbooks and multimedia materials such as "Psychology and Life" and "Zimbardo General Psychology" and is known as "the image and voice of psychology." Due to Professor Zimbardo's outstanding contributions in the field of psychology, he received the Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award in General Psychology from the American Psychological Association.
Quotes from the book
1. Evil grows from ordinary thoughts and is put into practice by ordinary people. This is the general rule, not the exception.
2. When most people have to face the severe test of social power, they will undergo major personality changes. We imagine what we might do when we stay away from the situation. However, once we enter the network of social forces, there is a huge difference between how we imagine our behavior and what we can actually do.
3. The influence of social situations on the behavior and mental operations of individuals, groups and national leaders is far more profound than we can imagine. Some situations exert a powerful influence on us, causing us to respond in ways we would never have predicted. ”
4. Societies that promote individualism, such as the United States and many Western countries, have gradually become accustomed to believing that nature is more important than situation. When explaining any behavior, we overemphasize the importance of personality and underestimate it. The influence of situation.
5. Let us assume that the "good" side of human nature is Apollo who possesses reason, order, consistency and wisdom, while the "bad" side represents chaos. , disintegration, irrationality, and Dionysus who follows the libido of life. The core characteristics of Apollo are the restraint and prohibition of desires, which is exactly the opposite of Dionysus-style liberation and indulgence.
1. The Origin of Evil Psychology - Angel Transformed into Satan
Lucifer was once the guardian of light and God's favorite angel, until he challenged God's authority and led a group of fallen angels to throw themselves into hell and become evil. In Milton's "Paradise Lost", Satan boasts: "It is better to be a slave in heaven than to be a king in hell. ”
In hell, Satan is a liar, relying on boasting, spears, trumpets, and flags to become the impostor of the place, and his deeds are comparable to many heads of state today.
In a meeting of devil leaders, Satan learned that he would never be able to return to heaven no matter what. His crony Beelzebub proposed the most evil plan to take revenge by destroying God's favorite masterpiece - mankind. God.
But even though Satan succeeded in tempting Adam and Eve to disobey God and go to sin, God still claimed that they would one day be saved. However, God allowed Satan to wander to the edge of prohibition, so Satan conspired with the witches. Seducing humans, witches have become a thorn in the side of exorcists. The terrorist methods of the Satan clan have given birth to an unprecedented evil system.
2. Theoretical analysis of the Stanford University Prison Experiment
Background: The United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The representative trends of that era were rejection of authoritarianism, "don't trust adults", opposition to the military and industrialization, participation in anti-war demonstrations, and participation in civil rights and women's rights promotion actions.
The volunteer students in the study came from a youth culture that emphasizes rebellion, personal exploration, denial of authority and blind obedience.
It was originally expected that the experimental subjects would be more resistant to institutional forces. Refusing to obey the "system" imposed on them. Unexpectedly, after becoming prison guards, these volunteers completely adopted the power-hungry mentality, and even more unexpectedly, they acted as prisoners. Although the students were in good mental and physical health, they quickly collapsed during the experiment. The originally planned two-week experiment had to be ended in a hurry on the 6th day.
Based on the analysis of materials obtained from Stanford Prison, Professor Zimbardo found that the reason why situational factors can influence and dominate an individual’s will and change their behavior is because a series of events occurred in the process. Psychomotor processes: including deindividuation, submission to authority, passive facing of threats, self-justification and rationalization.
Among them, "dehumanization" is one of the main processes that causes ordinary people to change their temperament drastically, become indifferent, and even commit crimes unscrupulously. It can obscure people's thinking and make the parties feel that other people People are inferior to pigs and dogs, and they believe that their enemies should be tortured and annihilated.
In addition, once any individual is in a specific social group, he will inevitably develop an inner need to gain group recognition.
When a person desires acceptance, the fear of rejection can demotivate one's ambition and deny one's autonomy. Even the mere thought of being excluded from the "outside the group" can make people do whatever they want.
3. Evil is not the exclusive preserve of tyrants
No matter how horrific atrocities humans have committed, as long as they are in the right or wrong situation, these behaviors may appear in any of us. On people.
In the face of various evil phenomena that occur in real society, although we can morally blame the direct perpetrators, we should never ignore the more important subject of responsibility, which is "inducing" The social situation makers of these evil deeds.
Because the situation is created by the system, and the system provides institutional support, authority, and resources so that the situation can continue to operate.
Therefore, they should rightfully bear overall responsibility for their evil actions. In other words, when an evil act occurs, the most important subject of responsibility is the system that "created" the situation in which the act occurred, that is, certain social rules and systems and the designers and actual controllers of these rules and systems.
4. To resist evil, we can be our own heroes
Each of us has potential or there are many possibilities within us. We can be a saint or a saint. Sinner; can be altruistic or selfish, kind or cruel, tame or dominant, sane or crazy, good or evil.
Perhaps we are all born with various possibilities, and it is only based on the differences in the social or cultural environment that governs our lives that we develop different characteristics in each person.
Although the line between good and evil is quite fragile, there are ways for people to resist evil actions. Professor Zimbardo believes that in order to prevent themselves from committing various bad behaviors and even degenerating into demons, people need to consciously resist the influence of situational factors, actively absorb the inner qualities and qualities displayed by heroes, and cultivate health and good self-awareness.