An Overview Of The Stanford Prison Experiment

For thousands of years, humans have fought one another for selfish reasons. Millions of lives have been lost in an attempt to gain wealth, land, and resources. Humans are selfish creatures who are willing to sacrifice the lives of the people around them simply for recognition. But humans are not born this way. Humans are not doomed to a cruel, evil fate the second they are born. Instead, they learn to be evil from the people they allow to influence them as they age.

Even from a young age, humans are able to distinguish the difference between good and bad. According to Susan Chun’s CNN article, “Are we born with a moral code? The Baby Lab says ‘yes’” (2014), a series of tests in 2006 by Yale University's Infant Cognition Center shows that infants

In some cases, like that of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the victims of human cruelty will be abused and have long term effects from the trauma endured. According to the article, “The Story: An Overview of the Experiment,” published on the Stanford Prison Experiment website, Philip G. Zimbardo, a physiology professor at Stanford University, conducted an experiment to study the abusive behaviors of prison guards. In order to do this, Zimbardo replicated the typical prison environment by taking 24 volunteers (12 prisoners and 12 guards) and putting them into a makeshift prison for 6 days in the basements of Stanford's Psychology building. When the fake prisoners arrived at the prison, they were dehumanized and humiliated by being striped, deloused, and then forced into a smock. The guards were then given the power to do anything they deemed necessary to maintain law and order. Some guards took advantage of this opportunity and began abusing the prisoners by denying them basic necessities like beds, food, clothes, and hygienic products (tooth brushes and buckets instead of toilets) after the prisoners rebelled on the second day of the experiment. The prisoners themselves were heavily traumatized to the point where they forgot they were participating in an experiment and could willingly leave on their own. According to the article, the chaos that occurred in this experiment

The parents might have done everything right and taught their children good morals from the start but their child would later take an evil path of murder and destruction. The environment in which the serial killer grew up in did not contribute to their actions later in life, so surely outside influences aren’t what make humans evil. Humans are evil from birth, only some are better at hiding it than others. However this is simply not accurate. Cases like Jeffery Dahmer and Ted Bundy are outliers when it comes to drawing conclusions about the natural behaviors of the human kind. Although both were provided with seemingly normal childhood experiences, they were both diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and psychotic disorder. Due to these two disorders, their brain functions differently than that of a “normal” human being. Their rationale is often hindered by these mental illnesses, resulting in violent outbursts. Thus, serial killers with mental illnesses are not reliable evidence when it comes to this subject. It would be impractical to make a general conclusion and argue that all humans are evil by nature simply because of these