Angels of Our Better Nature

This is all quite fascinating, but I have trouble believing that the smart Stanford students were playing their roles in earnest. I guess I'll have to read the book. I suppose if some of them had genuine nervous breakdowns, with crying and all, that counts as 'real'. At any rate, I agree with the general thesis that groupthink can neutralize individual conscience, based on my own common sense and observations. Abu Ghraib is indeed an example.

Great find George!

This is important work and I'm glad you exposed us to it.

Zimbardo seems like a decent bloke (maybe even too much). Interesting how he was skillful at avoiding explicitly laying the blame on anyone — even though you tried to nudge him in that direction a few times.

Anyway, I'm off to read about resisting influence: http://www.lucifereffect.org/guide_intro.htm ;)

I found this very interesting. I was a bit bothered by how he focused on the guards as victims, though perhaps that is understandable considering his role as a witness for one of them. Yet, he didn't seem very concerned about the prisoners as the ultimate victims — didn't even consider what was done to them torture.

He totally lost me in the last ten minutes with his "the devil made me do it" religious rhetoric. It seems his emotional desire for a happy ending led him to abandon science and retreat to his childhood religious beliefs.

But the Catholic Church? How ironic! Talk about an institution which has encouraged war and torture in the pursuit of wealth and power and has created an environment conducive to evil deeds (raping children) and covering it up for century after century. That was too much.

Even the very belief in a god and a religious dogma in my opinion actually impedes one's ability to discover an ethical framework, using reason, with which to live one's life. Is this not the reason that people in the US military today — as demonstrated in Pentagon prayer groups and the USAF Academy's pushing of fundamentalist xian religion — are trying to make religion a part of military life? They want to use it as a tool to justify their horrible acts.

The "devil made me do it" defense was funny when Flip Wilson's "Geraldine" said it. I find it disturbing to hear it coming from someone who is supposedly an eminent psychologist.