Is there a good person?

How to decide if a person is good or bad? What make people think of an action as bad or good? Can one person be good, if he or she has bad elements inside them? Is there any one on earth without bad element inside? Is there a person perfect? Well, enjoy this video!!!

[Continue reading...]

The Lucifer Effect: Review

Brain is the master of all evils and devils. Yet, we have understood it so little. How are human behaviors shaped, were human born good, can good people turn evil etc. remain unending questions.

Among subjects in undergraduate level, psychology deals with this kind of issues and brain the most (unless your major is neuroscience). My encounter with two psychology classes in my under shaped my ways of thinking in a positive way (at least I think so.) It is in those two classes that I got to hear the name Phillip Zimbardo, a prominent professor of psychology of Stanford University. It is from there that I started to follow lectures, speeches and the book.

The book stems from his worldly famous Prison Experiment at Stanford. He who organized the experiment was also shaped by the experiment. That is he was also turned bad by the system he set. Another uncontrollable fact was he happened to get to know his wife because of the experiment!!!

The author tries to answer these questions in this book:

“Is it possible for a good person to turn evil? Do you think you have an inner demon, or do you think that you could ever be swayed by bad influences, people or systems? Could you or someone you know ever rob a bank, steal from a neighbor or torture another human being? You'd be surprised at some of the good people who have found themselves doing truly evil things! Could this happen to you?”

Buddha believed that human were born good. Ignorance makes people do bad things by forming ill-willed desires and/or blinding ones from seeing that their actions would lead to harmful consequences. These are coincidentally also the main ideas of this book. The author backs up his arguments by the empirical evidence, especially the Prison Experiment.

Final Words

It is very easy, but maybe irresponsible, to just say that dictators such as Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler etc. are evils. But it is not a responsible move to say that they are not nationalists. Consider the case of Pol Pot of Cambodia. He was selected, although not totally by his merits, to study in France. He could choose to live happily doing a decent job in Cambodia or France after graduation but he chose to write opinions in a magazine criticizing the government on the unjust (in his subjective opinion) environment in his country and chose to fight against the government. He escaped to the forest, lived with modestly and feared the purge by the incumbent government troops.

Maybe none of us dear to sacrifice that much for our country or community. However, the sacrifice alone is far from deserving the label of a good person. Under his reign, the estimated of 1.7 million people died, starvation was prevalent, and people lived with the fear of death every second for unknown reasons. In this regard, the question of good people and bad people should be reconsider, and this book may enlighten its reader, I believe.

Full title: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 22, 2008)
My rating: 5/5
Author:  Philip Zimbardo

[Continue reading...]