A recent example of this is the bombing of the Boston marathon on April 15th 2013. That afternoon I was flicking through the tv channels out of boredom when i came across CNN news. I immediately had a flashback of when I returned from school 12 years earlier and my dad called me into the living room to watch the events of 9/11 unfold. This time I was the one calling him into the room and we watched in disbelief and wondered what sort of a monster could do this.
Ex classmates of one of the accused culprits, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, described him as 'a nice guy ', 'an ordinary kid', one that 'you would never suspect anything out of the ordinary from'. Those who knew him before this were stunned by what appeared to have done (and is now convicted of doing).
Philip Zimbardo investigated what it was that made people do evil. He looks at whether those that do evil are actually evil or are they ordinary people responding to extraordinary situations. He demonstrated this in the infamous and disturbing Stanford Prison Experiment.
In this experiment 24 male students from Stanford University were randomly assigned to the role of prisoner or guard. Every one of the participants were tested before hand to ensure they did not have any psychological disorders. The prisoners were arrested and processed then placed into a makeshift prison in the basement of the university. They wore an inmate uniform with their own inmate number on it as a method of removing their student identity and replacing it with that of a prisoner. The guards were not given any specific training, they were told to do what they had to in order to maintain order. The guards had their own khaki uniform, again, removing any identification as the students the were. Prisoners were often told to do push-ups as punishment for disobedience. On day two the prisoners rebelled by ripping off their numbers and barricading themselves in their cells. In retaliation the guards stripped the prisoners naked and placed the rebellion ring leaders in solitary confinement. In order to maintain control the guards decided to try psychological tactics and create a privilege system involving privileged inmates getting food, clothes and a bed to sleep in. The other inmates had all these basic needs taken away from them. They turned the prisoners on each other by giving random prisoners privileges to make them look like informants. At this point non-privileged prisoners were even denied access to the toilet. Some prisoners began to show signs of emotional disturbance. Six days into the 14 day experiment it was called off as people began to express concerns about it.
Below is an actual picture of prisoners in the experiment.
This experiment demonstrated the importance of situation in the behavior of individuals. Ordinary students who had no prior psychological issues began to do acts of evil such a removing the basic human needs of their fellow students. Even when fellow students started to display signs of emotional disturbance they did not stop the sadistic behavior. Afterwards the participants reported feeling committed to their roles which felt real to them.
Philip Zimbardo's 'The Lucifer Effect' demonstrates that good people can do evil things in certain circumstances.
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