Hi Anngwyn:
I¹m so glad you brought up the Lucifer Effect, which I recently read.
Looking back on the Stanford Prison experiment, Zimbardo, who directed the
experiment and is also the book¹s author concluded that while there is a
tendency to attribute ³evil² or ³bad behavior² to a ³few bad apples,² that
in fact ³bad behavior² is more a function of the situation than is commonly
assumed when we attribute it to the individual personality.
In other words, he concluded that most people in a given situation or role
would tend to behave in a similar fashion something we actually see in
constellations where the context and placement are key to the
representative¹s experience.
Obviously, this does not obviate personal responsibility.
One of the shocks of the Lucifer Effect is that in the Stanford experiment,
one of the most brutal ³guards² was a student who self-reported as a
humanitarian in the initial interview; also the professor running the
experiment (Zimbardo) became entrained in his administrative authority and
lost his moral compass, failing to intervene until the situation had
degenerated. He was awakened from his trance by someone outside the context
his girlfriend.
Finally, the recent documentary film, The Corporation, produced in Canada,
portrays the situational context of corporations, and rates them on a
psychological scale (as psychopathic). At the beginning, in a montage of
news footage, reporters repeatedly characterize criminal corporate leaders
as a ³few bad apples,² again belying the societal, structural, and
historical contexts that will tend to generate unethical, harmful behavior.
Alison
On 3/3/08 12:33 PM, Anngwyn at anngwyn@xxxxxxx wrote:
Hello All,
Sooner or later those of us who work with victims and perpetrators have to
give some serious thought as to our understanding of good and evil. The
short version might be that they are interdependent, one cannot exist
without the other. Bert's thoughts on this subject have been very
challenging for therapists who believe that their task is to rescue good
victims from bad perpetrators.
Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect has much to offer in explaining
how it is that good people can come to do bad things. In 1971 he conducted
a now famous experiment with Stanford students dividing them into
prisoners" and "guards". It became so brutally out of control that it had to
be stopped after a week.
And then there is also another famous experiment that was done at Yale
during the 1960s by Stanley Milgram. He set up a model whereby actors were
hired to be "learners" who would receive an electric shock if they gave a
wrong answer. There were no actual shocks given. The researcher posed as a
teacher" who then instructed volunteers for the study to administer the
shocks". for the learners own good. Most people would continue to press the
shock lever long after the "learners" (simulated) screams of pain.Few
questioned the instruction to continue inflicting pain as they were told
that this was "necessary"
All for now...
Anngwyn
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