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Christopher Quan
Psych 001
Prof. Rickgauer
May 1, 2014
Psychology of evil
Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist and former professor of Stanford University, talks about
the “psychology of evil” saying that morally good people enter a bad place and then as a result
they do bad things; his examples are of his Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib
prison tortures, both having the same scenario. In his TED talk he commented the similarities of
how good people went into both the Abu Ghraib prison and the Stanford prison experiment and
ended up abusing the prisoners; this is the psychology of evil. To put the psychology of evil
under an umbrella term it would probably be peer pressure or some sort of outside influence on
one’s behavior. Zimbardo cites Abu Ghraib because the soldiers were ordinary people with good
morals but ended up humiliating and torturing the Iraqi people in a prison and comes to a
conclusion that the good people that ended up bad were because of a stimuli, that being the
prison. “The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the
individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is
where the power is of the bad-barrel makers” (Philip Zimbardo on the Psychology of Evil). The
psychology of evil is interesting because it does have real world events that may correlate with it
and breaking the psychology of evil down it can be categorized as behavior influence by
surroundings, behavior influenced by confusion within, reflected the ways of parenting, and all
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of the factors somehow took away the morality of good people; in regards to biology, it all
happens in the frontal lobe.
The Abu Ghraib tortures and the Stanford prison experiment were not particularly good
events that happened, in fact the experiment was meant to portray a bad scenario. “Don't blame
us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers” (Philip Zimbardo on the
Psychology of Evil). Zimbardo clashed the Bush administration’s statement of the Abu Ghraib
tortures by hypothesizing that it was not that the soldiers were bad but that the “barrel” or their
surroundings were bad. “It could be the who of the people or the situational forces in the
behavior context” (Philip Zimbardo on the Psychology of Evil). By saying the situational forces
Zimbardo means that something had affected the good people and made them to be bad; the
forces in this case would be the prison setting. The Abu Ghraib prison was set up for Iraq people,
who were then stereotyped heavier than now, to be and with American soldiers having the power
over them, the behavior was affected. The American soldiers were most likely in their twenties
and can fall under the adolescence stage of Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
where role confusion is prevalent. When given their identity as a prison guard the soldiers of
Abu Ghraib and the undergraduates of the Stanford Prison study were shown to conform to the
idea of being an abusive prison guard not just because the situation gave them the power to abuse
the prisoners but also because it became the social norm.
Conformity played a great role in turning the good soldiers and undergraduates into bad
people that ended up abusing the prisoners terribly. “The study showed that conformity to social
roles occurred as part of the social interaction, as both groups displayed more negative emotions
and hostility and dehumanization became apparent” (Social Psychology by Saul Mcleod). The
undergraduates found their identities as guards and were told to abuse the prisoners; this could
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have been avoided because though they were told they were not forced to abuse the prisoners and
as the norm became abusing the prisoners more undergraduates found their role as authoritarians.
Similarly, the Abu Ghraib guards did not have a mandated way of handling the prisoners and
most likely as guards saw their fellow guards abuse the prisoners, it is safe to assume that they
thought that abuse was the way of treating the prisoners and their commanding officer, General
Janis Karpinski, had never ran a prison before giving the guards free reign. Both the
undergraduates and the soldiers of Abu Ghraib were given a direction though not a mandate;
undergraduates were told to abuse and the soldiers driven by stereotypes against the Iraqi people
made the soldiers more susceptible accepting that abusing the Iraqi people was good. With free
reign of how to handle prisoners, it reflects the three types of parenting and the types of
parenting can also explain why the prisoners ended up being damaged psychologically, besides
the fact that they were tortured.
The three types of parenting being Authoritarian, Permissive, and Authoritative; only the
Authoritarian and the Permissive parenting style matter in regards to the prison study and the
Abu Ghraib tortures. “Children and adolescents from authoritarian families…they have poorer
social skills, lower self-esteem, and higher levels of depression” (Ginsburg & Bronstein 1993).
The prisoners were subjected to rules that were enforced with terror and abuse by the strict
guards and as a result the prisoners, whether they are of Abu Ghraib or the prison study, were
psychologically damaged with severe anxiety. “Moreover, children and adolescents from
permissive families are susceptible to antisocial peer pressure” (Condry & Simon 1974;
Steinberg 1987). It has been hypothesized that the guards conformed to their roles as abusive and
demanding people; abusing people is pretty antisocial behavior and the guards probably adopted
it because of how the prison system was unregulated with an inexperienced superintendent and
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this goes for both the prison study and the Abu Ghraib tortures. Not regulating the guards led
them to behave in a way that where when their abusive behavior was not punished they would
just keep on abusing their power. The people that went in as guards and the people that observed
the prison study were people with good morals but for some reason seemed to be stripped of it.
No one had questioned the morality of the prison study when it was running or the Abu
Ghraib tortures; the events seemed to have stripped everyone involved of their morals. “Out of
50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its
morality” (Zimbardo 38). All but one seemed to have “climbed down” Kohlberg’s Levels of
Moral Thinking from Postconventional morality down to Preconventional morality and to an
extent Conventional morality. With the prisoners they only cared about obeying their guards so
that they would not be abused even harder making their morals fall under Preconventional. The
guards maintained some amount of Conventional morality because they were there so that the
prisoners would not riot and break out; they had kept and maintained social order but in the
process kept themselves at the top of the social hierarchy. The people who had overlooked either
the prison study or the Abu Ghraib prison can be said to have lost all levels of Kohlberg’s Moral
Thinking because they did nothing to keep order and did not follow any rules. The “psychology
of evil” is a form of extreme conformity that results in a loss of morality from normal people that
go in with good morals and all of this conformity happens within the frontal lobes of the brain.
The frontal lobes are the part of the brain that control judgment, reasoning, and the
reward system of the body and when someone conforms the reward system becomes more
active. “The rostral cingulate zone is thought to play a role in monitoring behavioral outcomes,
and the nucleus accumbens has been implicated in the anticipation and processing of rewards as
well as social learning” (Brain Mechanisms of Social Conformity). When one conforms these
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areas of the brain, which lie in the frontal lobe, tend to spike with activity more than other parts
of the brain. The nucleus accumbens, while controlling social learning, relies on only dopamine
and serotonin to work. “Low D2 receptor-binding is found in people with social anxiety or social
phobia” (Mandal on Dopamine Functions). People will conform to rid themselves of social
anxiety and to not be judged; in the brain more dopamine will be produced to keep the feeling of
belongingness and with the good feeling they are more likely to conform more. The guards of
both the prison experiment and Abu Ghraib have shown what levels of conformity that a person
can go through proving that some part in the brain, if everything hypothesized about it is wrong,
gives them a good feeling that they are accepted while inhibiting judgment and reason. The
dopamine system most likely produced, for lack of better words, so much dopamine that the
frontal lobes of the guards stopped working on judgment and more on rewards.
The “psychology of evil” is summed up from Philip Zimbardo’s TED talk as being a sort
of behavior change from a stimulus and can be prevented; though the TED talk said nothing
about the biological functions in conformity, the frontal lobes were the main parts of the brain
that were active at the time of conformity. “To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant,
because you're always going against the conformity of the group” (Philip Zimbardo on the
Psychology of Evil). Zimbardo suggest that by avoiding conformity one will develop his or her
own morals rather than the morals of the group seeing as that the morals of the group might not
always be good. This also assures the point that conformity is the leading cause of the behavior
change since it is advised to seek individuality as an effort to obtain real morals. Ignoring outside
influences, inside, the frontal lobes tend to reward conforming behavior when one conforms
most likely do to the fact that humans need to find a social group to belong in and to be safe in.
The psychology of evil is an interesting thing to think about because it can happen to anyone and
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there are real life events and biological functions that back up the claim that there is a so called
psychology of evil.