Unveiling Our Inner Evil: Lessons from Stanford’s Experiment

Evil is inside us, waiting for the perfect moment to burst through sensibility, going against our natural behaviour and beliefs. Stanford University’s 1977 psychology experiment holds. We can be evil if it’s necessary to do so.

Necessary.

When is it necessary to become evil?

Stanford University’s experiment, a relatively benign study about discrimination, exposed something new in psychology. Evil dwells at our core. (The complete experiment is here.)

Without provocation, these players became agitated. It escalated to the point of high violence. They rioted, forcing the study to end just hours after it began. It got so bad that its effects left participants scarred for months afterwards.

What was the task?

Spend two weeks in a basement, dressed in a simple costume that assigned them into one of two groups. That’s all. Almost immediately, those dressed as wardens adopted an authoritarian posture. Those dressed as prisoners adopted a position of subordination. The evil inside them awoke.

Police rushed to the basement and broke up the brawl, but the war in the test subject’s minds didn’t end that night. They experienced bizarre psychological disturbances in the weeks that followed. Prisoners heard voices and endured ongoing hallucinations.

This proves:

1. Evil dwells inside us.
2. Little keeps it arranged and contained.

In my novel (see below), I use the word re-association in opposition to psychology’s terminology dissociation. I believe the mind is highly adaptable to stress and pain and defies both by adjusting the narrative it interprets by finding a more justifiable position that permits violence and immorality.

Re-association suggests an adjustment (not a disconnection) from one point of view to a new, acceptable one. It is where the mind slides sideways, remaining intimately connected to everything to which it’s exposed and to everything that it needs to preserve proper order. This means that the thing we call evil is embedded into the fringes of our psyche, calling upon violent resources whenever they’re required — triggered sooner than most would think, even in the most resolute, stable of individuals.

The Stanford participants were given costumes, not roles. The characters the subjects adopted were entirely self-directed and generated. Violence was the inevitable outcome.

Yes, our inner animals are evil at their core. All it takes is the right situation to flick the switch on and bring the demon to the surface. Civility is just a thin, weak veneer that hides The Beast behind it.

–Michael (Author of Dark Fiction)