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Explain What Circumstances Might Lead People To Inflict Harm On Others

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This essay will be a discussion of the question, ‘what circumstances might lead people to inflict harm on others, even if this conflicts with their own moral values?’. This essay will use several academic studies and views to support the claims made, and will reflect on past experiments in psychological history which indicate when certain circumstances may lead people to inflict harm on others. This discussion topic has been widely scrutinised and analysed by various academic experts throughout the last century, with varying opinions and findings made by different experts. This essay will discuss the varying opinions of academics, and decide whether certain circumstances do indeed lead to people inflicting harm on each other. As mentioned earlier in this essay, there have been several past case studies and experiments which contribute to our overall understanding of why people act the way they do under certain circumstances. There have been many different suggestions as to why people act the way they do. For example, Kelman and Hamilton (1989) state that the vast majority of human atrocities can be described as ‘crimes of obedience’. They claim that in most significant cases of aggressive human behaviour, the actions of these humans are not …show more content…

This essay, while it certainly understands and appreciates the opinions of Zimbardo and Milgram, would tend to agree more with the findings of Haslam and Reicher, as their studies certainly demonstrate a deeper level of understanding and detail when it comes to discussing where the harmful actions of some people stem

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