The Stanford Prison Experiment: The Cause Of Evil

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Describing someone with the word “evil” refers to them committing an action that is considered immoral and malicious. Evil people pull off these type acts: robbing a bank, violent killings of living creatures, and even mental abuse through verbal or physical actions. Many people always wonder, what was the initial purpose to committing such inhumane actions? They may say hatred, anger, and revenge are some of the causes of evil. Although these traits do cause the idea of evil in an individual, the inspiration for iniquitous intents are — in fact — sprouted through the unideal human traits of apathy and ego.

One of the human traits that causes evil is apathy; for it makes people not consider other individuals’ feelings and security. Every
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According to the article “What makes good people do bad things?” by Melissa Dittman, they state an event that occured in 1971. The text is as follows, “Zimbardo noticed that in his own simulated jail experiment in 1971--the Stanford Prison Experiment-in which college students played the roles of prisoners or guards, and the guards became brutal and abusive toward prisoners after just six days,...The experiment showed that institutional forces and peer pressure led normal student volunteer guards to disregard the potential harm of their actions on the other student prisoners.”. A psychologist named Phillip Zimbardo analyzed this experiment to understand the concepts of human nature. Despite this being a “simulation”, the volunteer guards, due to the stress in peer pressure, became violent and abused the prisoners; the idea of considering the students’ safety was thrown out of the window, and led to the torture the innocent people had to go through. When faced with a situation that seems challenging or unfeasible, people cope with the pressure through apathy. In the Stanford experiment, the students granted with the responsibility of being a guard were possibly given a sense of stress. After six uneventful days, the guards thought that they …show more content…
Having an ego means self-confidence in oneself; however, if its taken to a certain extent, results in a conniving personality. Cyberbullying is a case of ego being pushed to its immoral extent. Cyberbullying is the act of harassing someone through any electronic device and platform. The Internet grants cyberbullies the ability to be anonymous, being able to create a persona that hides their true self. With this power, cyberbullies can throw millions of hateful comments at innocent people online. Unfortunately, the innocent people have no clue who is behind the malicious intent. There are ways to stop these people, such as blocking them or reporting them; but, cyberbullies can just create other accounts to continue the onslaught of hate. Cyberbullies put down others to grow their ego and self esteem. Due to feeling inferior and useless to the world, they gain a sense of joy by bashing on others; also, they know the victim can’t “talk back”, boosting their villainous demeanor. They feed off of the sorrows and sadness the innocent people express by making them inferior and helpless; their ego is strengthened for all the wrong reasons. Another example is the dreadful treatment of the Jewish race from 1933-1945. The Aryans were a European racial group that considered themselves “the master race”. They discriminated on