The slippery slope of evil

One more excellent documentary in Redes: La pendiente resbaladiza de la maldad (sorry, it's only in Spanish).
This time Eduard Punset interviews Philip Zimbardo. In the early seventies Zimbardo conducted one of the most revealing experiments ever done on Human behaviour, the Stanford prison study. In short, he selected some volunteers among Stanford students and tried to recreate with them life in prison. Students were divided in two groups randomly, one group would represent prisoners and one group would represent the guards. In a few days everything was out of control, "guards" had adopted their role so deeply that were almost torturing the "prisoners". Even Zimbardo himself had entered the game so much that was unable to realize how grotesque the whole thing had turned... At first, prisoners showed rebellious and questioned the authority of the guards, but once they started to feel stressed by the situation, they ended up accepting their role of "oppressed". One important point of the experiment is that these early 70's Californian students were mainly part of the dominant youth culture of those days, that is, anti-war, anti-authority, political awareness...

Different conclusions can be drawn from this experiment, I quite like this found in wikipedia:
The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.
I would add that it demonstrates how easy it's for humans to accept a given role and (over)act according to it, that is, act according to what society, bosses... expect from us, and not according to our inner desires...

The results of the experiment are in line with those of the also famous Milgram experiment. In this second case "oppressors" were obeying direct orders, not just doing what should be expected from them, but anyway, conclusion seems similar to me: people like to obey, to follow a given path instead of tracing their own... Accepting authority is a comfortable way for many people, as it releases them from moral dilemmas concerning their actions, if you're just following orders, it would be the Master who should reflect about the morality of the actions he's commanding, but not you. So, in the end, we're selling our souls and free will for a bit of "comfort".

There's another related experiment, The Third Wave that tries to demonstrate the appeal of fascism. Some months ago I watched a rather good German film inspired by that experiment, "The Wave".