It was the autumn of 1945, Europe was torn to pieces, Japan was devastated, countless were dead and the human race was emerging from a horrid nightmare that it had created and unleashed upon itself. The Nuremberg Palace of Justice was beginning to witness the first in a long series of trials that would delve into the human capacity of evil.  The United States was awakening to the fact that it had dropped two bombs on a country killing millions of innocent men, women, and children whose only crime had been their nationality.  Weary and half starved Europeans were emerging from the concentration camps of Nazi Germany leaving behind their barbed wire confines to face the fact that much of their lives and family were dead and gone.  Humanity was left to ponder what it was that drove them to such extremes of violence and evil.

Theologist returned to the debating table along with philosophers to try to understand this phenomena but it would be with a new branch of human thought, born from the ashes of WWII, that would quickly emerge and lead the field of understanding the human capacity for evil.
Psychology until this point had largely been a European discipline but with the bombings of London and the crackdown on intellectuals by the Third Reich many of the founders and pioneers of Psychology had fled to the States and reestablished themselves in Universities and Colleges across America.  Not surprisingly the U.S. took fondly to the new discipline for it had been a nation founded on individualism and the basic ideas that humans were the masters of their own fate.  Therefore the science of understanding the individual, their thoughts, and their behaviors would be most fitting.  Such names as B.F. Skinner, Maslow, Rogers, and a whole host of Neo-Freudians fresh from Europe would come to dominate the discipline of Psychology thrusting America on the edge of research and understanding.

From this two experiments emerged.  One conducted by Stanley Milgram dealt with the phenomena of obedience to authority while the second was Phil Zimbardo's experiment that led to insight on the emergence of behaviors in seemingly healthy and "good" individuals deemed as evil in society.

(Dr. Stanley Milgram)

In Stanley Milgram's experiment American's who in any other regard would be considered healthy and morally centered where taken by Milgram and told that they would be participating in a memory experiment.  They were given the name of "Teacher" and told that when the other subject answered a question incorrectly that they were to administer an electrical shock.  As the questions progressed the voltage of the shocks increased and all the while the participant receiving the shock begged the teacher to stop the test.  When the teacher tried to stop the researcher in the room said that the experiment needed to continue.  Reluctantly but still doing so the teachers returned to the task 2/3 of the time administering shocks that were extremely deadly even as the other participant begged for them to stop.

What they did not know was that the other participant was in fact an actor and the shocks were harmless.  Yet what the experiment showed to peoples horror was in fact that normal healthy people were capable of great evil.




Some of you may be familiar with Dr. Phil Zimbardo's work in the 1950's that revealed an understanding of the human capacity for acts that society deemed as evil.  The experiment consisted of taking a large group of college student males and placing them in a situation that gave them the ability to exercise near complete control over others.  What Zimbardo found was extremely disturbing.  When 'normal' humans were left to their own devices the following ensued-


Recently Philip Zimbardo has published a book that looks at the capacity for human evil.  It is a book that I am greatly looking forward to reading. 

With the U.S. currently using torture on prisoners, terrorism in the Middle East, and a re-examination of the "American Character" the human capacity of evil is a pertinent and noteworthy subject for consideration.

Why do you think that humans have the capability for evil?