How Can Evil Be Propagated?

This week in class we read chapters 2-4 of Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect. In these chapters, Zimbardo begins to explain the Stanford Prison experiment in a story-telling fashion. These chapters explore everything that happened from the beginning of it all, the Sunday arrests, to one of the prisoners stating that he needed to leave Monday night due to deteriorating mental health. In less than 48 hours, this group of students of which had all been equals, had transformed into two completely separate groups. Those who had been randomly chosen to be guards had begun to take complete power and control over those who had been prisoners, most of which simply obeyed the commands of their fellow peers in “power”. The thing with this however, is that Zimbardo and the rest of the researchers had no part in deciding what the guards or prisoners would do. They gave no indication of what a “guard” should do and what a “prisoner” should do, so why did the guards begin to take on such a strong, bootcamp-like position? This is the question at hand; how can someone begin to do evil things to someone they had previously been equals with? How does the situation change, what are the motives, the reasons, the ideas?

This question can possibly be answered by looking at the culture. Since Zimbardo did not give any sort of indication as to how the “guards” should be treating the “prisoners”, I assume that their actions come from a cultural idea of what a guard should be treating their prisoners like; this idea could come from movies, television shows, books, stories told by friends and family, or other beliefs held by those surrounding us. Perhaps the “guards” acted upon what they believed guards should act like, and this is why they were aggressive, demanding, and belittling to the “prisoners”.

The news articles I want to focus on for this week have less to do with direct evil, but more of an indirect type of evil. Just yesterday a British TV host by the name of Caroline Flack unfortunately took her life, for reasons unknown but the assumptions circulating have been that it was due to the media and her recent trial for allegedly assaulting a man. Throughout the time in between her being charged and the day of her death, Caroline had been trolled on the internet with various articles trashing her name and her career. How does this relate to evil you ask? In order to relate this to evil it is important to look into the all of the ways this happens. Reporters are surely notorious for always presenting news to the media as fast as possible when it happens, but this can come at a cost. In the recent helicopter crash involving Kobe Bryant and his daughter, his wife had heard the news of his passing online before she had the chance to hear it from a person at the scene such as an officer or a medic. In this situation with Caroline Flack, news reporters went from trashing her to now eulogizing her, sending their sympathy to her boyfriend and families while also getting far too close to them in order to get evidence of them being “broken up” about the matter.

With this, I want to link this type of evil to group identification and identity leadership. The individuals that work for news reporting companies are surrounded by individuals who see no harm in doing these things because to them it is a job. They are focused on getting the story first as it is the group’s objective to make a reporting as soon as a news story arises. This could be comparable to those acting as guards in Zimbardo’s experiment, as they were a part of the group in charge, those leading the events and they worked off of each other to do their “job” that they thought they were supposed to be acting out. In an article by Stevens et al. (2019), they investigated the idea of group identification, identity leadership and attendance in the context of sports. They were interested in finding whether being a leader and being identified as a part of a group increased participation and attendance. The article at hand used a large sample of individuals on amateur sports teams and presented them with various questionnaires regarding their leadership roles on the team, how much they identified with the group and the amount that they attended meets (Stevens et al., 2019). The findings indicated that if the leader of the group presents the group with a sense of community, the group will feel more connected and will be more content taking part in activities. The more that the group members felt that they could connect to the leader and that the leader made them feel like they were a part of the whole, the more the members were likely to attend and therefore take part in group tasks.

In relating this to the topic this week, if the fellow guards felt that they were a part of the guard group, they were more likely to take part in belittling the prisoners. This would have been easy for them to feel like as they were separated from the prisoners in the way they dressed, the things they got and the way they were treated in the simulation. This can also be applied to the reporters in that if their boss or team lead made them feel like a part of the group by giving them tasks and getting them involved, they would be more likely to want to take part in challenges to see who could get the report first and who could get the best shot. These things while they may not seem evil in the immediate sense, they truly can do damage to the “other”, the person outside of the group. Surely making news reports and the idea of acting as a guard outside of these contexts do not prove to be dangerous to others, however when it involves the futures of others, it can understandably be traumatizing to be the one acting as the prisoner, or the one who’s story got told too soon or in the wrong way.

References: