TED Talk Assignment

Melissa Bose

Department of psychology, University of Guelph - Humber

PSYC*1250 (01.02): Critical Thinking in Psychology

Dr. J Salem - Wiseman

November 24, 2024

In his TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo says that normal people can do terrible things when certain

situations and systems make them more likely to do so. Zimbardo disagrees with the idea that bad

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behaviour is necessarily caused by a person's personality. Instead, he says that situations like

authority, group dynamics, and environments that make people feel less human are more important in

making people act badly. His main point is that situational and systemic factors, not internal

"badness," are what make people do bad things. Zimbardo sheds light on the psychology behind this

change from good to bad, calling for a change in how we think about and deal with the causes of bad

behaviour in society. Zimbardo's main point is that the Stanford Prison Experiment shows in a

controlled and organised way how situations can make people act in bad ways. In the 1971 study, 24

college students were put in a fake prison and randomly assigned to either be a guard or a prisoner.

The participants' crazy behaviour meant that the study had to end early after only six days, even

though it was supposed to last two weeks. The prisoners were quickly given unfair and harsh

punishments by the guards, who also abused their minds while the prisoners showed signs of being

very stressed and helpless. According to Zimbardo, the guards weren't naturally cruel; they were just

reacting to the roles and power dynamics that the environment set up. The test showed that social

roles, authority, and the dehumanising environment of the fake prison were enough to make the

participants break their own morals. He makes a strong link between his research and things that

happened in the real world, especially the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. He

uses this example to show that the soldiers weren't naturally mean. Instead, they were acting in a way

that was influenced by authority figures, power structures, and treating prisoners as "less than

human." The soldiers were in a stressful place, were put under pressure by their bosses, and were

given power without being supervised. Like in the SPE, Zimbardo says that the soldiers' lack of

accountability and the fact that the prisoners were not seen as human were major factors in their cruel

actions. This example shows that systemic and environmental factors, not personal evil, are very

important in understanding how people can do bad [Link] order to add to his argument, Zimbardo

talks about the "Lucifer Effect," which explains how people's minds change from good to evil. Three

main ideas in this framework are obedience to authority, anonymity, and spreading out responsibility.

In some situations, Zimbardo says, people feel like they have to follow orders from authority figures.

In some situations, Zimbardo says, people feel like they have to follow orders from authority figures,

even if those orders go against their own morals. People who play roles in big groups feel anonymous,

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which makes them not care about the results of their actions. This makes them act in ways they

wouldn't normally. Also, diffusion of responsibility, which is when people feel less personally

responsible when they're with a group, can make people even less likely to stop themselves from

doing bad things. Instead of thinking that evil comes from people being mentally ill, Zimbardo says

that if we understand these psychological processes, we can better see how it happens when people

interact with their environments. With these reasons—including real-world examples from the SPE,

historical ones like Abu Ghraib, and his own theory—Zimbardo makes a strong case for his thesis. In

his talk, he shows how systemic, social, and environmental factors can turn normal people into

evildoers. He stresses the need to build structures that stop these kinds of negative influences from

taking hold. Even though Zimbardo's case for how situational and systemic factors affect how people

act is strong, there are some major problems with his reasoning: People don't like Zimbardo's

argument because it relies too much on the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment. A lot of people

think that the experiment's methods were flawed, but the results show how social roles and power can

affect behaviour. Zimbardo may have accidentally changed the participants' behaviour as both the

main investigator and the "prison superintendent," according to critics. The results can't be used by

everyone because there wasn't enough control, the study ended early, and only a small, non-

representative group of people were studied. Because of this, the experiment brings up some

important ideas, but it might not give us a complete or useful picture of how normal people turn into

bad people in the real world. When Zimbardo talks about how situations can affect people, he

sometimes downplays the importance of personality traits and making moral choices. Even though

situational and systemic factors are important, personal agency, cognitive dissonance, and the ability

to reflect on oneself are also very important in ethical behaviour. For example, some SPE participants

chose not to be abusive even though they were under a lot of pressure to do so. Although Zimbardo

focuses on the environment a lot, he runs the risk of oversimplifying how personal traits and outside

factors affect moral choice. A lot of Zimbardo's argument comes from the Stanford Prison Experiment

and well-known cases like Abu Ghraib. However, these are just isolated cases and don't provide the

large-scale, systematic evidence needed to draw such broad conclusions about how people act. The

examples given are strong, but they don't fully show the many other times when people defy the

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pressures of their surroundings and act morally even when things are bad. His thesis would be

stronger if it was based on more solid empirical evidence, like longitudinal studies and cross-cultural

research that show how the psychology of evil is not only situational but also changes based on

person, culture, and setting. Although Zimbardo's argument has these problems, it is still mostly

convincing for a number of reasons. To begin, he successfully challenges common ideas about evil by

showing that it's not just something people are born with but is often shaped by outside forces. The

examples he gives, especially the Stanford Prison Experiment and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, show

how authority, anonymity, and social roles can have a big effect on how people act. Milgram's

obedience experiments and other well-known psychological theories support these examples. They

show how authority and the situation can affect making moral choices. The argument could be

stronger, though, if it took into account the subtleties of individual choice and the fact that people

behave in different ways. Although Zimbardo makes a strong case for how systemic and situational

factors can cause people to act immorally, the argument isn't quite complete because it doesn't look at

individual factors. In spite of this, the main point of the talk—that situational factors have a big

impact on behaviour—is strong and has important implications for understanding how evil appears in

social settings. By looking at the bigger social and systemic problems that lead to bad behaviour,

Zimbardo gives us a useful way to deal with these problems in real life, which makes his argument

overall strong and thought-provoking.