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The Lucifer Effect Essay

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Devil within Sometimes we wonder why people do things. Is it because they were forced to? Maybe they were pressured into it, or maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. In the book The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo he studies the psychological motives of humans and situational personalities. Zimbardo produced an experiment called the “Stanford prison experiment” which put one group of students as guards and another as the prisoners. The main point of the experiment was to watch the prisoners and see how they reacted to being detained; however, when the experiment was conducted it was the guards who were more interesting to study. When looking at the students who were selected to be guards they were no different from …show more content…

This way was just as effective as physically harming them. From the very beginning the guards needed to assert their power and authority so it gives the impression of a real prison and makes the experiment as real as possible, they succeeded. They brought in a priest who heard confessions from prisoners and when he listened to the mock prisoners even he began to think it was a real prison and he said that the responses that he heard were similar to real prisoners who had just been imprisoned. The Stanford Prison Experiment shows the type of people we become when put in certain positions. As humans we can not truly predict what we will become in these positions of power and solitude. Another example of situational psychology is what happened in Abu Gharib. Abu Gharib became a prison for suspected terrorists against the United States. The guards of the prison, who were US military, treated the prisoners like animals. They put them on leashes, made them strip and were put in extremely awkward positions, and sometimes they went as far as killing them. Now the guards can not be completely forgiven for what they did but the situation they were put in was part of the reason for how they behaved. They were constantly reminded of their friends being killed in combat and were surrounded by violence themselves. Also, the way they were behaving became the norm, they were not getting in trouble for it and they were soldiers, killing machines. Their job is not to watch a bunch

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