"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment
Story Highlights
Experts: Any person, when placed in a particular situation, may do harm when told

In the Milgram experiment, participants believed they were giving electric shocks

Recent research confirms Milgram's findings

The Stanford Prison Experiment explored the horrors of a prison environment


By Elizabeth Landau
CNN
(CNN) -- If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?


Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.

In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.

The legacy of Stanley Milgram, who died 24 years ago on December 20, reaches far beyond that initial round of experiments. Researchers have been working on the questions he posed for decades, and have not settled on a brighter vision of human obedience.

A new study to be published in the January issue of American Psychologist confirmed these results in an experiment that mimics many of Milgram's original conditions. This and other studies have corroborated the startling conclusion that the majority of people, when placed in certain kinds of situations, will follow orders, even if those orders entail harming another person.

"It's situations that make ordinary people into evil monsters, and it's situations that make ordinary people into heroes," said Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and author of "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil."

Turning the principle around

But while ordinary people have the potential do to evil, they also have the power to do good. That's the subject of the Everyday Heroism project, a collection of social scientists, including Zimbardo, seeking to understand heroic activity -- an area in which almost no research has been done, he said.


Acts such as learning first aid, leading others to the exit in an emergency and encouraging family members to recycle are some heroic behaviors that Zimbardo seeks to encourage.

"Most heroes are everyday people who do a heroic deed once in their lifetime because they have to be in a situation of evil or danger," he said.

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http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/19/milgram.experiment.obedience/index.html