What makes good people go bad? That question still
rings around until this day. There are theories following this question: a bad
history, lack of attention, need for love, etc. However, the director of the
Stanford Prison Experiment, Phillip Zimbardo proposes his own ideas. Phillip
Zimbardo is a university professor at Stanford University, teaching previously
at Yale, NYU, and Columbia. He has been given several awards as an educator, researcher,
writer, and service to profession. The Stanford Prison Experiment, for those
who do not know, was an experiment performed in which college students were
picked out and randomly given the role of either a guard or a prisoner. They
had to behave as their role for two weeks in a prison simulation. However, the brutal
transformation that took place among the ‘guards’ deemed the experiment unsafe,
cutting it down to only six days. Analyzing his and others’ experiences with
this vivid transformation, Zimbardo does his best to answer how or why this
darkening takes place. As I hope to be either a therapeutic psychologist or a
forensic psychologist, I am hoping to be able to turn to this book for the
darker end of my career. This title caught my eye; I always thought that evil was
something that was developed or created from something darker. A violent
upbringing, the constant feeling of hopelessness, regret, a lack of attention,
and much more are all examples of reasons that I have found that result in some
sort of ‘evil’. According to the Bible, Lucifer was once God’s favorite angel.
However, that all turned upside down when he became a fallen angel and became
the one the Christian community recognizes as Satan. When we think of evil we
think of Jeffery Dahmer, the Zodiac Killer, Hitler… Never once do we look up
and realize that we may fall victim to a darkening one day.
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