Here we are friends, the end of a semester and for many of us, the end of our time here at Trent. What a crazy time in the world for us to be wrapping up our undergraduate degrees and our educational year as a whole, but nevertheless we can make do with the situation, cope as we may and wrap up this class as well. I must admit, the thought of wrapping this all up in one blog post surely seems like a daunting task but with this much time on my hands I’m sure I can figure it out. Or can I?

This semester studying The Psychology of Evil has been a whirlwind of information, theories, thoughts and assessments and while very complicated as proven to stay interesting and thought provoking through every topic. As the weeks barrelled on we learned about things such as garden-variety evil, corporate evil, evil to family members and loved ones, cults, taking pleasure from others’ pain as well as the power that a situation can have on one’s ability to do evil things. Through all of this however, I still am struggling to find a concrete definition of evil; while I think that the definition we came up with early in the semester still fits well, I think that a lot of it comes down to situation, and personal opinion. This makes it hard to find one concrete definition, but I think that this is important to evil as well. Evil does not present itself as one single entity, evil can be anything from stealing from a small business to murdering someone, and all things in between. Evil presents itself differently in different circumstances, situations and to different people. To the person following orders perhaps their idea of their actions are not evil but to the person the orders are being taken out against, they are.

Due to all of this, our class had no shortage of topics to debate and issues to confront. I could define evil as something implicitly done to harm others, but that could leave out people who fall into Baumeister’s category of Idealism, wherein the evildoer is doing evil things as they think they are bettering the world and are not doing so with the implicit intention of harming others. I could also try to define evil as something done to others in hopes of eliciting personal pleasure from their pain, however we know now that the amount of people who do harm just to see others suffer is relatively small. I suppose if I was tasked with coming up with one single definition, I would say that Evil: an action towards another individual, group or society that results in what the victim sees as harmful. While I know that this definition may not fit all ideas of evil, I believe that this is a definition that can be used with context and perception in order to identify whether something is evil. I think this because it takes into account the perception of the victim, if the victim deems it as evil than the action can be seen as evil to that individual based ultimately on how the act affected them. Ultimately, I think that the victim has one of the most important views on evil; while yes their opinion may be shrouded in the concept of what has been done to them, are they not best at visualising the harm that the action can have, and then should they not be able to identify it as evil to them? I believe they are, and they can.

In terms of this class, I think that no amount of personal research could have taught me the things I learned over the semester. While I could have learned about the technicalities of it all and read the texts to go a bit more in depth, the biggest strength of this class to me was the discussion. Being able to discuss and hear different opinions on each topic truly helped me see things from different perspectives and reading the blog posts from my classmates furthered this even more. I feel super lucky to have had a great group of peers to work through this material with, and I know that these ideas will stick with me as time goes on. This can further the idea that evil needs to be looked at from different perspectives, as it furthers our understandings. In this class we were able to distinguish that evil is not one single entity but rather is something based in situations and situational power, perceived outcomes, perceived harm, the separation between victim and perpetrator, and intentionality. This class provided me with many different views and understandings of evil and while I am still driven to continue to learn more, I will be able to do so with the information from this class in my toolbelt.

Thank you for a great semester!

At this point in the semester, we’ve spent weeks looking at evil occurrences, looking for deeper meaning, and ultimately asking the big question; WHY did this happen? We ask this question for many things in life as it allows us to gain a better perspective of the situation, to allow us to understand maybe even just a bit more, to make the situation more plausible to us. Asking why can also help us in trying to answer the question we have been asking all semester – is the person inherently evil, or is it the act itself that is evil?

This week we were tasked with reading the conclusion to Roy Baumeister’s text Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. In this final chapter, Baumeister focuses on answering the main question from his text – Why Is There Evil? In this, he closes his text by providing the reader with four major root causes of evil: Simple desire for material gain, Threatened Egotism, Idealism and Pursuit of Sadistic pleasure. These themes were all present throughout our time together as a class both in readings and in classes, and I’d like to look through these root causes as a sort of closure to the class in identifying how these root causes can relate to our class and the world on a larger scale.

Primarily, we can look at a simple desire for material gain. Baumeister mentions that these may not be universally regarded as wrong, but there is a playing factor in this distinction and that is the way the individual goes about getting the material gain. This can be explained by someone wanting something material and using violence and/or crime in order to get it, rather than using a reasonable and ethical way of getting it. Some examples of this could be robbing someone’s home, stealing from a local store, or even something such as murder for status.

The second theme is that of threatened egotism, which we explored in the beginning of the class with the soldiers who were trying to shoot a toddler not because they were interesting in killing the child, but more so that they were desensitized to the idea of murder and were more focused on proving themselves as the better gunsman. This sort of theme can be seen in many many cases of evil as well, such as someone committing an evil act simply because someone says they couldn’t do it, someone killing another due to a threatened ego from the other not showing respect or humiliating them, or even possibly concealing important information due to the nature of this information dragging their reputation. This can loosely be seen in the opinions from the novel Coronavirus and its origins in Wuhan, China. Many individuals have stated that China must have known about COVID-19 prior to releasing information to the public, and the blame is being put on the country being too prideful to ask for assistance or to warn other countries as it could put the blame on them. While there is no way that I can be sure that this is true, there are quite a bit of articles present online and opinion pieces written about it, such as this article by Fox News**. This article focuses on Senator Marco Rubio and his opinions on Coronavirus and the way that China handled the pandemic in its early stages, or in his opinion, the lack of handling thereof. Rubio essentially states his frustrations with China in their apparent withholding of information, which he believes led to the more drastic spread of the pandemic. This can be an example of threatened egotism as Rubio explains that he believes the reason has to do with China’s self-image and their desire to cover up any issues they were having, which ultimately was an evil act as it caused a larger spread.

The third root of evil is idealism. Baumeister explains this as someone believing they are doing good but in this they feel that they can take extra measures and strong force in order to make hard decisions to continue their mission. We can see this in a large scale by looking at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Sure, their mission is backed by ideals of caring for animals and ensuring animals are treated fairly, however some of the measures they take in order to do so are hard to be justified. Protests can be extreme, advertising is often driven by a need for clicks rather than a focus on spreading information, and raids can result in very negative outcomes.

Finally, the fourth root of evil is for the pursuit of sadistic pleasure. We spoke about this in one of our class presentations, wherein we looked into the idea of sadistic pleasure, where it comes from and how evil in this sense is enacted. The topic of sadistic pleasure we determined is that it draws a fine line between what can be considered evil versus what cannot be in this sense. Baumeister explains that even through killing, torturing and rape, the majority of these individuals do not experience pleasure from inflicting harm, but these could still be examples. In this, an individual who kills, tortures, rapes, or does other evil acts with mainly a strong desire for pleasure as the root of the intention, would be considered doing evil things for sadistic pleasure.

By breaking evil down into these four categories, it is easier for an understanding of the WHY to some extent as it allows us to find a reason within these categories. The last little bit of this chapter looks into the future of evil and how it will be seen. Something that really stuck with me from this chapter is that we never really see our evils as being as big as they are at the time being. The Nazi regime was so terrible and while there certainly were individuals at the time that saw it as completely evil, we are now looking back at it with the mentality of “never again”, however it still happens in our societies. We are able to look at evil through a lens of the past and condemn it, while somehow still taking place in these types of evil acts today. This is not to say that we are not getting better as humans and absolutely not to say that we are either, however the lens of understanding as time progresses is certainly something that forces us to have a more evaluative lens on our present, rather than the past or the future.

This week in class we spent very little time talking about our texts, as the majority of the class time was focused on presentations. Despite this however, we still managed to make a small amount of time at the end to wrap up our thoughts about the main theme. We came up with the idea that ultimately, it comes down to the situation and given a certain situation, we all have the potential to become evil or do evil things. This theme is a heavy one as it can certainly weigh on us as we tend to think of ourselves in a sort of optimistic way, as if we can do no wrong and the idea that we potentially could is hard-hitting.

The presentations this week encompassed the ideas of the death penalty, the blue code of silence, psychopathy and cultism. In focusing on the topic of the death penalty otherwise known as capital punishment, it is interesting to look at attitudes surrounding it regarding the severity of the case, and taking an eye for an eye. In class we discussed the question of whether it is moral for the state to kill someone given the fact the individual in question had killed one or many. In this case, we questioned whether it would be moral to commit the same act that the person is on trial for committing. If someone kills, would it be moral to also kill them? Ultimately the presenter decided that no, it is not moral and should be considered evil, and I must admit that I agree with her. This topic of conversation is one that always seems to get different attitudes and debates started, but to me the question is as much about moral integrity as it is about the actual decision-making.

In a study by Rogers, Sharf, Myers, Drogin and Williams (2019), the focus of research was to understand the attitudes of undergraduate students in the context of being in a capital jury deciding whether or not to give the death penalty. They wanted to know how often misrepresentations (described as denials or outright deception, either concealing one’s views or dissembling the opposite viewpoint) would be present in a jury trial. In giving the participants capital jury questionnaires to fill out that were used in actual death-penalty cases, the results from two studies indicated that they were both very susceptible to misrepresentation and this did not differ between those who supported capital punishment and those who did not. This would indicate that despite personal values, there is still a large possibility that misrepresentation could be happening in juries that are deciding the ultimate fate of a criminal. With this, it can be understood that opposing the death-penalty can come not only from a place of it being immoral, but also from a place of it being impractical. There are many individuals who are mistrialled and who have been accused of crimes they did not commit who are put on death row and many are sentenced to death without proper evaluation of their case. Some of this will have to do with needing closure to the situation, not wanting to “waste” resources of keeping the individual in prison, and some of it will blatantly have to do with race. Everyone in a crime is ultimately looking for the reason why, and unfortunately many people still show a blatant bias.

In an article by CTV News, the main focus was to highlight the discrepancies in trialling individuals who are african-american. In noting several different cases, the majority of them all demonstrated situations in which the individual on trial, being african-american and mostly being tried by an all-white jury, were given unjust treatment throughout their trial and were tried unfairly. In states where the death penalty is present, this can be extremely problematic. In the case of this article, all of the trials took place in Tennessee, where the death penalty is present and racism is very prominent. This piece speaks of the ingrained injustices to african-american individuals dating all the way back to slavery, and the fact that these attitudes are ever-present in today’s juries as well despite the moves forward that have been made. In these circumstances, african-americans can and will be tried more harshly and will likely have issues of misrepresentation by the jurors in their trials, furthering the reasons for the death-penalty as being immoral and evil. If those who are deciding the ultimate fate of an individual are overtly racist towards them, it would be similar to placing someone from the victim’s family on trial. There is a conflict of interest in the situation and while those individuals on the jury may not go out and directly murder and individual with whom they have a racist bias towards, giving them the power to do so in a court where the individual may even be wrongly accused seems absurd.

This again comes down to the possibility of one being able to do evil things given the situation they are placed in. In the situation of being placed in a jury, ultimately the jurors are given power that they may not be worthy of. If someone brings their own bias to the situation in which they are in power, it is easy to assume that given the research we have done, they would act on their biases. This further explains the fact that the death penalty is problematic, as jurors may be bringing their own biases, they may be misrepresenting themselves, the individual may be tried incorrectly and finally, as our parents always told us, “an eye for an eye makes all the world blind”.

This week in class we read chapters 5-8 in Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect. In these chapters, we followed more of the Stanford Prison Experiment, including their visit from a former church Pastor as well as a visitation day with their families. Amongst all of the chaos in the ‘prison’, there is a clear demeanor of who is in charge and who is following orders. The ‘guards’ are proving to take their roles perhaps a bit too seriously, and while some ‘prisoners’ do choose to rebel, they always seem to fall back onto following the guards rules. With this, we have a clear topic for the week; The Bystander Effect.

The Bystander Effect is a social psychology theory in which individuals will see something wrong happening, but still not intervene as they assume that someone else will do it. In the case of the prisoners, it is easy to think that they were waiting for someone else to intervene such as Zimbardo himself or even the other prisoners. However in the experiment, we can also see the prisoners rebelling and one prisoner even needing to leave, and these prisoners are punished or humiliated for doing so. Similarly to this, when one guard voices his opinion in noting that their tactics might be going a bit too far and that they (the guards) might need to tone it down a bit, he is also humiliated for not being “man” enough for the job. With this, we must ask whether it is the bystander effect, or the fear of one’s safety. At the same time, aren’t these two somewhat explaining the same thing? The bystander effect can be noted as a lack of acting, but we must look farther into it to understand why some people may not act; we can see that perhaps some of the students may not have acted because they felt that if they had, it would only result in more punishment to themselves. Some of the guards may not have acted as they saw how the other guard had been treated when he spoke up. It is also clearly easier to not speak up because it is easier to follow the crowd, this way there is no standing out, no possibility for humiliation and one will fit in easily if they just follow suit.

When looking at the bystander effect, a study by Moisuc and Brauer (2018) investigated how an individual would react to a situation involving bullying based on the relationship they held with the individual being bullied. The study involved 1386 students from both middle schools and high schools, and using a between-subjects design, they were randomly assigned to a group wherein the [immoral] scenarios they would be asked about would be happening to a stranger, an acquaintance or a friend. Within this study, the results demonstrated that the closer the individual was with the subject in the scenario, the more likely they were to intervene with interventions for strangers being the least likely, interventions for acquaintances being more likely, and interventions for friends being most likely. The researchers determined that this is due to what they identified as a “moral closeness” to the situation and to the individual in the scenario. This essentially means that the closer the person is to the person being bullied the more likely they are to intervene, and I think that this provides a strong pull for understanding how people in the Stanford Prison Experiment did not intervene. The students in the experiment were all strangers going in, and why should they feel the need to stand up for someone when they did not know them? According to this study it would be less likely for them to intervene as they are not friends, but after a few days it is easy to assume that at that point they may have been closer to acquaintances than to being strangers, so this could explain intervening in some instances but not in others.

Intervention in scenarios where one is being treated as less than another is very important, though. It can do amazing things for the person being defended, and it can make a show to the person doing the discriminating that there is someone on the others’ side. A perfect example of this in today’s news would be the Wet’suwet’en protesters, those who stand with them and those who stand against them. After weeks of protests, The National Post released an article explaining that there has been a draft agreement reached with ministers and protesters in British Columbia. This agreement comes from a place of pressure that was put on the ministry and the government as a whole by the Wet’suwet’en people, other Indigenous Canadians as well as Canadians of all other ethnicities who are able to understand the severity of the situation. Had there been no intervention from the Wet’suwet’en people and their supporters, the government would have continued their plans to lay the pipeline without land consent, however now the government is forced to look at the impact this could have.

The impact of bystander influence is a large one, and perhaps if there had been more of a bystander intervention in the ‘prison’, then maybe there would have been a chance that less bad things would have happened, maybe there would have been less of a divide against the two groups, or maybe the study would have ended even earlier than it did. While these things are hypotheticals, the impact of bystander intervention is one that has been proven and should be focused more on as a means to solve issues. There are many programs that encourage individuals to stand up for others when it comes to bullying and our society has been very keen on outing social injustices, which makes me want to believe that situations such as the Stanford Prison Experiment would not have ended in the way that it did. On the other hand though, is there any way that we could ever truly know?

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.

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Hey everyone! My name is Emily Vachon, I am in fourth year at Trent University, finishing up my BSc this semester. My long term career goal is to become a psychotherapist focused on counselling individuals who have suffered through various levels of trauma. This career choice came to me after spending a summer working as a student in a women’s shelter, where I was able to make connections with women and families from all walks of life and experiences. In only four months, this position opened my eyes to the impact different trauma can have on an individual, and I immediately knew that this would be the career for me.

Outside of school I currently have two part-time jobs, I am teaching myself to knit, and I’m learning various ways to be as eco-friendly as possible (my 2 biggest 2020 resolutions). I missed the first week of this class because I was on the waitlist but I’m looking forward to a semester investigating the construct of evil in psychology. I have been interested in taking this course since I toured Trent the first time and I’m excited to see what kind of discussions we will have over the course of the semester!