I enjoyed this TED Talk so much that I went out and bought the guy's book, The Lucifer Effect. Philip Zimbardo is best known as the psychologist that ran the Stanford Prison Experiment. In the experiment (which he describes briefly in the video and in great detail in his book), Zimbardo took a group of "normal" college age kids and put them in a prison. Randomly, some kids became prisoners while others became the guards. After 4 days, the prisoners suffered such extreme breakdowns, the study was cut off. The acts of abuse by the guards in such a short time helped lead Zimbardo into a lesson about evil. The guards were good, average kids, but in charge of a prison they morphed into power-driven, sadistic, control freaks. In the 2000's, the good men and women of the US Army disgustingly tortured the prisoners of Abu Grab prison in Iraq. Zimbardo's talk answers an age old question: How can good people do bad things? Perhaps we a too quick to place ALL of the blame on the criminal. Yes, the criminal should be punished, but some situational forces pushed him/her towards that choice. Finally, Zimbardo offers a little hope by discussing how to train the heroes-in-waiting in all of us.
Zimbardo does a great job during this talk, and covers far more in 23 minutes than I can on this blurb. I must warn you: some of the images are quite graphic. For a short period, he shows some of the pictures from Abu Grab. They are disturbing to say the least, but the horrifying images invoke a curiosity to understand how it could have happened.
Enjoy.
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