How people turn EVIL

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My good friend Limpid showed me a passage from her psychology textbook (Psychology Core Concepts, 7th edition by Philip G. Zimbardo, Robert L. Johnson and Vivian McCann) of how good people turn bad that just blew my mind, so I have to share it with all of you (but that's coming at the end of this how-to. First I'll give a few examples before providing this proposed mechanism).

I hope this is common sense, but this how-to is NOT inspiration for how you can become a psychotic dictator and commit crimes against humanity. These are ideas to explore in your stories, with your antagonists and even with your protagonists and supporting characters. This is for ideas of how to realistically make your good characters go bad or how your villains are the evil SOBs they are today.

The man who came up with this theory, Philip Zimbardo (who's one of the authors of the aforementioned textbook) is the head researcher behind the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a research study conducted at Stanford University back in 1971 and funded for by the US Office of Naval Research. This study took male college students and assigned them to be either prisoners or guards. The "prisoners" were actually arrested and went through the entire arrest procedure. They were subjected to strip searches and given prison outfits. The guards were instructed to only call the prisoners by their assigned number. The prisoners performed degrading tasks such as cleaning the toilets with their bare hands. When punished, they'd get their mattress taken away and would have to sleep on the floor, etc.

The results were mindblowing. Both the guards and prisoners took their roles much too deeply and seriously. Some of the guards started showing genuine sadistic tendencies, subjecting the prisoners to psychological torture. The prisoners were driven to their emotional limits, some having legitimate mental breakdowns. I won't go into details of the torture and abuse they were subjected to in this how-to, but you can read about it online to understand the full scope of this study.

There are criticisms as to what you can take away from this experiment because of the subjective rather than objective nature of the study, the lack of a control group, and the theory that these students were simply "role-playing" than actually internalizing their roles, but I still believe this study is a significant piece of evidence suggesting the influence of environmental/situational effects on human behavior (again, take this entire study with a grain of salt. The results are fully up for your interpretation). You can read more about this experiment and see the actual study description given to the participants here: http://www.prisonexp.org/links.htm (also linked to in the EXTERNAL LINK).

A prominent real-life example is a prison headed by the US overseas (I won't say the name because I don't want you guys looking it up. Just reading the Wikipedia entry on it really messed me up. It took me forever to get to sleep last night because I was so traumatized by it. That's how disturbing and disgusting and horrendous the torture was. If you know what I'm talking about, please don't mention the name or in the comments, either.) What happened was American soldiers subjected these prisoners to the most inhumane physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and torture. Here's an example of inhumane behavior from this atrocious event that really stuck with me:

They took some prisoners, stripped them naked, and piled them on top of each other in a pyramid. There's a photograph of two US soldiers--a male and a female--posing behind this grinning and giving a thumbs-up to the camera. This is a VERY tame act compared to some of the things I just read about happening there, so it's a solid example of the evil in the world and shows that (seemingly) good people have treated other human beings like that. I have always been an advocate that good and evil are just socially constructed ideas, but something like this is just... I don't even think even "evil" can begin to cover it.

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