Reply #4: The Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment [View All]

[JDPriestly]

show, as I understand it, that about 60% of the population will do horribly cruel things to others if they are persuaded that an authority figure wants or is forcing them to do the cruel things. Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment and has written a book on it entitled "The Lucifer Effect, Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

I believe that this phenomenon explains why terrorists do the horrible things they do -- and why governments and politicians sometimes authorize horrendous chaos and killing. I am not talking about a specific government when I say that. There are few if any countries that can claim never to have performed some act of communal horror either on their own citizens or on the citizens of other countries.

If only we could understand the mechanism that causes us to participate so readily in brutality, the world would be a better place because we could then counteract that mechanism or disable it.