The Power of the Situation

Today in my psych class, we watched a video by Philip Zimbardo called “The Power of the Situation”. I’ve mentioned Zimbardo before in my blogs, so I think it’s clear that I find the guy extremely fascinating.

The video is about how certain situations control the way we behave. As a lot of you know already, Philip Zimbardo is the man who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in the 70’s. He wanted to see how obedience and conformity play a role in society. A group of college boys volunteered to participate in Zimbardo’s experiment. Half of the boys were prison guards, and half of the boys were prisoners. Most people would say that since it’s just an experiment, they’re not going to act like real prisoners and guards, but little did they know that eventually, this experiment would become a reality.

The guards began force the prisoners to do humiliating things and they would force them to do push ups. These were perfectly nice boys who volunteered to participate in a study, why would they act like that? It’s the power of the situation. When you put someone in a costume and give them a role, they will act that role as if it’s really them without even knowing it. In the beginning, the boys knew it was just a study, so they didn’t take anything to the extreme, but gradually they began to forget that it was just an experiment and started to act as if they really were prison guards.

This mock prison in the Stanford basement was supposed to be open for 2 weeks, but closed after only 6 days because mock inmates began to suffer from psychological problems. As I was watching this video, I really began to think. I was shocked to learn how evil a normal person is capable of being. We will do anything if an authoritative figure tells us to, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong. Take Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock Experiment. He also wanted to see how obedience and conformity play a role in society. He took a group of people who were oblivious to what Milgram was doing and told them to give a person in another room a shock every time they answer a trivia question incorrectly. It doesn’t seem to bad, but the scary part is that with every wrong answer, the voltage of the shocks increased by about 100 watts. The highest voltage was 440 watts I believe, which is fatal and can cause death, but strangely enough, sinch Milgram, an authoritative figure, told the participants to continue with the voltage, they didn’t stop. The people being shocked would scream in pain, and the participant would still continue because Milgram said to do so. Of course they weren’t really being shocked, but the shockers didn’t know that.

It’s so interesting to hear about things like this because we’re always so shocked and say to ourselves “I would never do that! I would never be that dumb. I’d yell at Milgram and leave the room” that’s actually the exact opposite of what we’d do. For some reason, we put people in positions of authority on pedestals and assume that they know best. This is obedience at its worst. If I was an FBI agent interrogating a suspect, and my boss told me to slap the suspect every time I thought he was lying, I would probably do it because my boss told me to, even though it’s completely wrong.

The situations we get ourselves into have so much power of us we don’t even realize it. We behave differently in every situation we’re in. Whether it’s at school, at home, at the grocery store, or in court, we always act a certain way and it amazes me. We all have the capacity within ourselves to be evil, we just don’t see it until we’re in the situation.

The second point brought up in Zimbardo’s video was conformity. We do this on a day-to-day basis. I do it all the time in my classroom. When the professor asks “how many of you think gay marriage should be legalized?” a certain number will raise their hand, but I’ll keep my hand down until I see how many people raise their hand for the second part of the question, and THEN I’ll make my choice. It’s kind of embarrassing to be the only person raising your hand, but when 15 other people are raising their hands with you, you feel a lot more reassured and you feel confident and like you fit in. That’s why we conform. We don’t realize it, but we do.

I’m not writing this to give solutions on how to fix this, I just hope to enlighten you because it really is fascinating. Humans are so complex and have so many layers to them. We’re all born good, evil is a learned behavior and situations like these are when we’re tested on what we’ve learned. Sadly, most of us fail that test.