mardi, mai 18, 2004 I've had a number of discussions about "situational humanity" with my parents and Adeline, due to the torture of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The talk always led back to that one experiment by some top college in the USA, where researchers conducted a large-scale experiment on human behaviour in prison.After psychological testing and elimination, the researchers rounded up (paid) volunteers and put them in "jail", arbitrarily assigning volunteers to be guards or prisoners. After just SIX DAYS, the planned 2-week experiment had to be called off, because of terrible abuses being heaped upon the "prisoners" by the "guards". These "guards" were picked at random from the original volunteer group, and had not displayed any particular predisposition to behave in such a manner. Talking to Adeline about it, the topic took a natural turn to the notion of evil. We were discussing the notion that Man is evil - not even a newborn babe is free from sin. I guess the experiment by Stanford supports this idea. It is rather scary, the idea that something so new to the world could be considered evil, but it is true that we never have to teach kids to lie, or to steal, or to do bad things - it seems to just come to them. Instead, you end up having to teach kids NOT to lie; to tell the truth instead, NOT to steal; to be honest. It's an uphill battle all the way. [Stanford Prison Experiment] |
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