Bulletin No. 1, 2013

46 Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2013 Distinguished Lectures Psychologist on the Distinction between Good and Evil Prof. Philip Zimbardo , Professor (Emeritus), Department of Psychology, Stanford University, presented a lecture on ‘My Journey from Evil to Heroism’ on 29 January 2013. Internationally known as the ‘voice and face of contemporary psychology’, his Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) in 1971 remains a most cited and controversial example of situational evil. Twenty-four normal and healthy applicants were chosen and randomly assigned the roles of guards and prisoners. The projected two-week experiment terminated after six days when the situation had spun out of control and five ‘prisoners’ had to be released after breaking down from mental and physical abuse. Professor Zimbardo explained, the rotten barrel spoils the good apples. Certain situations, e.g., power without oversight, tend to breed evil and corrupt human nature, blurring the distinction between good and evil to an extent that normally ‘good’ people will commit evil deeds. He called this the Lucifer effect. The case of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by US military prison guards in Abu Ghraib is an exact duplication of the SPE. About the flip side, Professor Zimbardo raised a question, ‘Are there circumstances that make ordinary people do good things?’ He hoped that the private virtue of compassion, when transformed into socially engaged heroic action, could become the cure for evil. He emphasized that ‘heroes’ are neither unique nor talented; they are just ordinary people who act extraordinarily, as in the examples he cited afterwards. Rosa Parks , a black seamstress in Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in 1955, p rote s ted and s t a r ted t he movement of desegregation of buses and trains. Irena Sendler , a Polish lady, created a network of 20 people to save the lives of 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them f r om t he Wa r s aw J ew i s h Ghe t t o du r i ng World War II. Nine-year-old Lin Hao returned twice to the shattered classroom during the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake to save two classmates from danger, simply because he wanted to fulfil the duty of a class monitor. A participant of SPE, Christina Maslach forced Zimbardo to acknowledge the cruelty and inhumanity that he had allowed as the prison superintendent, prompted him to end the experiment the next day. These heroes were all ordinary people who stood up, spoke out and acted courageously in the face of challenging situations.