Zimbardo Reading Assignment Questions

Your Name: Paul English

Title of work:When Good People do Evil, pg. 219

Author of work:Philip Zimbardo

You may type or write below, but the more detail you give, the better.

1. What is Zimbardo’s main argument?

Our behavior and mental state is determined as much by our environment, current situations, and assigned roles as by our own will. We may think we have great control over our lives, and over the choices we make, but we can easily fall into situational behavior that leads us to fulfill orders or persuasions that an independent observer could find immoral, or inhumane. As much as we think we know what we would do in situations like these, we can never know until the dice has been rolled, and the evident odds are against our supposed free will.

2. Give three ways he supports his point:

a. He tours us through the setup and understanding of the teacher/learner torture experiments explaining the results and reasoning that would lead innocent people to assume the role of torturer. In the measured outcomes we see that the majority of participants fulfill the roles that the experimenter has setup, even though our moral judgments would presume that only a small fraction would participate.

b. When describing the trials and judgments of the Nazi soldiers who were in charge of the extermination of large amounts of Jewish prisoner’s a point is made to emphasize how normal these people were found to be. There was nothing exceptionally sadistic or evil about them from a purely objectivist standpoint, lending credibility to their argument that they were just following orders.

c.In the later examples provided that talk about the cult like following, we can see that people can give up more than just their freedom. Ultimately laying down their lives in suicide, in addition to subjecting themselves to torture and rigid obedience to a leadership figure in full submission.

3. How can we avoid the possibility of beinggood people who do evil? (This is your opinion.)

We have to question ourselves often. We have to seek out many different authorities for the decisions we make, not just relying on the closest authority, or the one who is demanding the most from us. We have to learn to stand up for our own ideals in the face of seemingly innocent scenarios. It’s certainly not an easy thing, and I doubt that one can really preach about how to deal with a situation like this, unless they’ve had a chance to take part in a situation like this. We shape our environment, and by avoiding the kind of situations that lead to the abuse of power, we can more likely avoid falling into the trap of doing evil. In a sense you have to be somewhat rebellious or untrusting in nature.

4. Give one quotation from the text that you particularly liked or think is important, and explain why.

“I had just returned to Monroe High from a horrible year at North Hollywood High School, where I had been shunned and friendless (because, as I later learned, there was a rumor circulating that I was from a New York Sicilian Mafia family). Back at Monroe, I would be chosen ‘Jimmy Monroe’ –most popular boy in Monroe High School’s senior class. Stanley and I once discussed how that transformation could happen. We agreed that I had not changed; the situation was what mattered.”

This is probably the basis of much of the Author’s thought regarding this subject. To experience two completely opposing social spectrums simply by way of situation and environment, probably helped to clue both Zimbardo, and maybe even Milgram, into the deceptive nature of our own societal roles. How easily the same person can be considered the top of his class, as opposed to the bottom, or the undefined nothingness of a normal High School existence.

5. Come up with 3 questions of your own about this reading and the issues and ideas presented.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you’ve felt you’ve either abused power for the sake of obedience, or felt abused by someone else in authority?
What can we do to prevent the kind of behavior exhibited in the various experiments and situations we’ve read about?
Why are we susceptible to blind obedience and role fulfillment?