Voices
always hustlers, guys who make
a living by getting good kids to do
bad things for a little money, like
steal, run drugs, sell their bodies,
and worse. Why did some kids give
in and start down that slippery
slope of evil, while others resisted
and stayed on the right side of that
line separating good from evil?
As a religious little Catholic
kid, though I dutifully prayed to
God to help me resist such daily
temptation and deliver me from
evil, it was hard to really count
on God having the time to check
out what was happening around
1005 E. 151 St. There were wars
to attend to, Hitler to be contained, hurricane victims needing
help and Communists to be converted. So I reasoned I had to be
more self-reliant and band with
buddies I could trust to provide
strength in our numbers against
those perpetrators of evil. And it
worked for some of us.
This concern continued for
much of my life, until, as a research psychologist, I reasoned
the best way to understand evil
was to go beyond theological analyses, philosophical discourses and
dramatic renditions, to actually
“create” evil in order to understand its dynamics from the inside
DR. PHILIP
ZIMBARDO
out. My classmate from James
Monroe High School in the Bronx,
Stanley Milgram, had set a workable agenda for doing so through
his pioneering investigation of
Obedience to Authority back in
1963. His experimental research
at Yale University quantified evil
in a novel way: how many volts
of electric shock would someone
administer to an innocent victim
when an authority figure ordered
him or her to take such action
that went against conscience? His
findings shocked the world: The
vast majority of participants, ordinary adult citizens, two of every
three, went all the way down the
30 switches on the shock generator from an insignificant initial
mere 15 volts, increasing incrementally by 15 more volts, until
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HUFFINGTON
03.17.13