4720-Week 1

As I noted in my introduction I missed the first week of classes so my post will not have any reflections on the discussion had in class on Wednesday, rather I will be just discussing my own understanding of evil and its constructs.

The Stanford Prison experiment was actually the first movie that ever got me interested in studying psychology. After watching the movie cause it was on TV one day, I dove into deep research about the experiment and Dr. Philip Zimbardo himself. Throughout my years studying at Trent, there is seldom a class where we do not speak of the experiment and the findings that came from it. In my own understanding, evil isn’t inherently a personality trait, but rather something that an individual can take on at one point, and leave at another. Evil is the doing, not the being, and perhaps it makes me an optimist but I don’t necessarily believe that people are evil but just that they may do evil things when placed in situations employing evil or where they are influenced to do evil things. By this I’m obviously referring to the experiment wherein the participants were not evil people but rather turned evil when they were placed in the situation, but I also say this in referring to individuals with mental illnesses who are “told” to do evil things by god or a voice in their head, to give some examples.

These thoughts are certainly influenced by listening to Dr. Zimbardo speak of the experiment, but perhaps I’m an optimist in believing it wholeheartedly. To me, evil is doing bad things, but not necessarily being bad. Evil is what we think of when we think of supervillains or antagonists in stories but when I think of bad people in the world that we live in I never find myself referring to them as ‘evil’ but rather just bad. Evil, in my opinion is the the most “bad” I can think of; for someone to be evil I think they would have to be bad in all walks of life, with a complete absence of good whatsoever. Because of this, Evil is a word that I do not use or think of very often, and I can’t think of a time when I have ever used it to describe someone in my life or in our society. I know that evil is present, but I do not think that it is something ever-flowing in society in the way that some people may think it is.