A video segment of Phil Zimbardo’s interview with a NY Times interviewer is available in the Times site. It includes some backgrround on the Stanford Prison Experiment, and talks about its relationship to the Abu Ghraib prison debacle, and the capacity for good or evil present in all of us. Click here for the NY Times site.
EDIT: There is also a brief interview in print form — similar questions, but with some different responses. Click here to read that article. My favorite quote:
Q. You keep using this phrase “the situation” to describe the underlying cause of wrongdoing. What do you mean?
A. That human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The “situation” is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Technorati Tags: morality, psychology, social psychology, structural violence
