Some of the subjects in milgram's experiment later said, oh, i knew it was fake. Well, that's just cognitive dissonance. One guard you had who said, decades later, he said,Oh, it was all fake. I wasn't really being a bad ass and then the prisoner who threw that tantrum fit to get out now says, ah, you know, he just did it to get out to study for his g r es,. And he didn't, he wasn't really upset. So when people do evil things, it's never the big thing first. It's really getting seduced into ebl. Once you step off from good kid to not a
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.