CelticBear’s Musings

The latest Skepticality podcast episode: http://skepticality.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=199743#
has an interview with Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He was in charge of the famous studies in the 1970′s that showed how any ordinary person can turn into “an evil person” and commit atrocities given the right circumstances.
In fact, one of the reasons he wrote this book recently was because of Abu Ghaib. The military and the administration had kept saying that it was a few bad apples at the prison, yet the events at the prison nearly mirrored the escalation of abusive behavior and even some of the acts that were encountered in the Stanford experiment.

Some of the more fascinating tidbits, quite paraphrased, from the interview include:

<> The bush administration’s disdain for science, substituting faith for data, is horribly detrimental for understanding human behavior in such a way as to be able to prevent instances like Abu Ghraib or allowing torture in general.
Has wiped away 200 years of socio-political advancement by legally redefining torture to allow what prior to 6 years ago was considered atrocious, has redefined what is a combatant, has removed habeas corpus.

<> All the wars we’re going to be fighting in the future is the kind of war we’re fighting now; we’re still preparing and planning for symmetrical wars, and it will never be that again. It’s always going to be insurgent wars against occupying armies.

<> Everyone is capable of being Mother Theresa and being Idi Amin. To say people are “good” or “evil” is to minimize the wonder and complexity of the human mind–and ignores the danger of how circumstances can make an ordinary person do terrible things.

<> We should all think of ourselves as “heroes in waiting.” It takes action to do good.

<> You think about being something and you’ll become that something–you think about being an everyday hero, and you will be more likely to perform heroic behavior. We teach our kids, show them examples of everyday heroism and they will be more likely to perform everyday heroic acts.