Charting the psychology of evil, decades after 'shock' experiment

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."

There's a lot more in the article that is fascinating, and discouraging as well. Everyone should read the article and ponder the ramifications. Here's the link...

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

But, what about the article mentioned above, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"? You should go to the web page with the article and the official web page for "The Lucifer Effect."

http://www.lucifereffect.org/

Here's the opening paragraph on the website...

Welcome to LuciferEffect.org, official web site of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007). In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan.