The Heroic Imagination Project

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i like your model, cause it assumes people are basically pretty good, most of em, except for the dark trawheadof folks, or whatever. Yet if you take to, say, the fortune 500 corporations, most don't turn into world consand and nd enrons ar corrupt environments. So i guess the questionis, how do you explain why there aren't more those, or more mili? You write about mili and via nam, which was a pretty horrible situation for a lot of soldiers. Yet most soldiers don’t turn into a callion and shoot children and women at close range and so on. Most people don't act like that. Well

August 15 marks the 50th anniversary of day one of the Stanford Prison Experiment — one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. In this conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo, exploring the mechanisms that make good people do bad things, how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally, and what this says about the line separating good from evil. His book, The Lucifer Effect, explains why we are all susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” and how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Shermer and Zimbardo discuss: Zimbardo’s life mission to understand the nature of evil, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) and its critics, the nature of human nature, The Dark Triad that leads to violence, obedience to authority, free will/determinism, and how we can teach ourselves to act heroically.