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Philosophers, dramatists, theologians
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have grappled with this question for centuries:
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what makes people go wrong?
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Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid.
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When I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto
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in New York, I was surrounded by evil,
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as all kids are who grew up in an inner city.
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And I had friends who were really good kids,
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who lived out the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde scenario -- Robert Louis Stevenson.
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That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to jail.
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Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance.
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So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction.
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The only question is, what was in the juice?
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And more importantly, that line between good and evil --
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which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable,
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with them on the good side, and the others on the bad side --
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I knew that line was movable, and it was permeable.
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Good people could be seduced across that line,
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and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover
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with help, with reform, with rehabilitation.
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So I want to begin with this this wonderful illusion
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by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher.
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If you look at it and focus on the white,
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what you see is a world full of angels.
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But let's look more deeply, and as we do,
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what appears is the demons, the devils in the world.
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And that tells us several things.
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One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil,
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because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition.
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It tells me something else. If you remember,
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God's favorite angel was Lucifer.
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Apparently, Lucifer means "the light."
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It also means "the morning star," in some scripture.
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And apparently, he disobeyed God,
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and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority.
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And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent
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to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels.
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And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan,
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becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins.
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Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil.
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He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though.
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So, this arc of the cosmic transformation
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of God's favorite angel into the Devil,
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for me, sets the context for understanding human beings
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who are transformed from good, ordinary people
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into perpetrators of evil.
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So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives --
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the negatives that people can become,
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not the negatives that people are --
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leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power.
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And that's the key: it's about power.
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To intentionally harm people psychologically,
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to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas,
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and to commit crimes against humanity.
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If you Google "evil," a word that should surely have withered by now,
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you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second.
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A few years ago -- I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was,
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with the revelation of American soldiers
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abusing prisoners in a strange place
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in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
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And these were men and women
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who were putting prisoners through unbelievable humiliation.
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I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised,
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because I had seen those same visual parallels
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when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study.
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Immediately the Bush administration military said ... what?
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What all administrations say when there's a scandal.
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"Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples,
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the few rogue soldiers."
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My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually.
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Maybe it was the barrel that was bad.
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But how am I going to -- how am I going to deal with that hypothesis?
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I became an expert witness
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for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick,
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and in that position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports.
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I had access to him. I could study him,
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have him come to my home, get to know him,
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do psychological analysis to see, was he a good apple or bad apple.
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And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures
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that these soldiers took.
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These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature.
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All of them come from the cameras of American soldiers.
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Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera,
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they took pictures of everything. More than 1,000.
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And what I've done is I organized them into various categories.
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But these are by United States military police, army reservists.
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They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all.
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And it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift.
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Why? Tier 1-A was the center for military intelligence.
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It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there.
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Interrogators from Titan Corporation, all there,
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and they're getting no information about the insurgency.
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So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers,
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military police, to cross the line,
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give them permission to break the will of the enemy,
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to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up,
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to take the gloves off. Those are the euphemisms,
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and this is how it was interpreted.
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Let's go down to that dungeon.
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(Camera shutter)
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(Thuds)
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(Camera shutter)
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(Thuds)
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(Breathing)
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(Bells)
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So, pretty horrific.
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That's one of the visual illustrations of evil.
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And it should not have escaped you that
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the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out
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with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity
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is that that prisoner was mentally ill.
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That prisoner covered himself with shit every day,
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and they used to have to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink.
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But the guards ended up calling him "Shit Boy."
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What was he doing in that prison
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rather than in some mental institution?
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In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
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He comes down and says, "I want to know, who is responsible?
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Who are the bad apples?" Well, that's a bad question.
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You have to reframe it and ask, "What is responsible?"
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Because "what" could be the who of people,
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but it could also be the what of the situation,
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and obviously that's wrongheaded.
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So how do psychologists go about understanding
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such transformations of human character,
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if you believe that they were good soldiers
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before they went down to that dungeon?
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There are three ways. The main way is -- it's called dispositional.
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We look at what's inside of the person, the bad apples.
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This is the foundation of all of social science,
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the foundation of religion, the foundation of war.
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Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah,
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people are the actors on the stage,
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but you'll have to be aware of what that situation is.
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Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume?
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Is there a stage director?"
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And so we're interested in, what are the external factors
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around the individual -- the bad barrel?
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And social scientists stop there, and they miss the big point
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that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib.
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The power is in the system.
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The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals,
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and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background.
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And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers.
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So if you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation.
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If you want to change the situation,
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you've got to know where the power is, in the system.
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So the Lucifer effect involves understanding
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human character transformations with these three factors.
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And it's a dynamic interplay.
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What do the people bring into the situation?
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What does the situation bring out of them?
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And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation?
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So my book, "The Lucifer Effect," recently published, is about,
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how do you understand how good people turn evil?
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And it has a lot of detail
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about what I'm going to talk about today.
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So Dr. Z's "Lucifer Effect," although it focuses on evil,
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really is a celebration of the human mind's
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infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel,
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caring or indifferent, creative or destructive,
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and it makes some of us villains.
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And the good news story that I'm going to hopefully come to
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at the end is that it makes some of us heroes.
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This is a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker,
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which really summarizes my whole talk:
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"I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome.
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Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam
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of positive and negative personality traits
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that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances."
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(Laughter)
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There's a study some of you think you know about,
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but very few people have ever read the story. You watched the movie.
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This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx,
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and he asked the question, "Could the Holocaust happen here, now?"
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People say, "No, that's Nazi Germany,
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that's Hitler, you know, that's 1939."
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He said, "Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you,
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'Would you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, not me, I'm a good person.' "
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He said, "Why don't we put you in a situation
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and give you a chance to see what you would do?"
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And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people.
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500 New Haven, Connecticut, 500 Bridgeport.
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And the ad said, "Psychologists want to understand memory.
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We want to improve people's memory,
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because memory is the key to success." OK?
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"We're going to give you five bucks -- four dollars for your time."
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And it said, "We don't want college students.
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We want men between 20 and 50."
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In the later studies, they ran women.
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Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people.
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So, you go down, and one of you is going to be a learner,
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and one of you is going to be a teacher.
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The learner's a genial, middle-aged guy.
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He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room.
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The learner could be middle-aged, could be as young as 20.
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And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab coat,
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"Your job as teacher is to give this guy material to learn.
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Gets it right, reward him.
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Gets it wrong, you press a button on the shock box.
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The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it."
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That's the key. All evil starts with 15 volts.
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And then the next step is another 15 volts.
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The problem is, at the end of the line, it's 450 volts.
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And as you go along, the guy is screaming,
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"I've got a heart condition! I'm out of here!"
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You're a good person. You complain.
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"Sir, who's going to be responsible if something happens to him?"
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The experimenter says, "Don't worry, I will be responsible.
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Continue, teacher."
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And the question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts?
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You should notice here, when it gets up to 375,
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it says, "Danger. Severe Shock."
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When it gets up to here, there's "XXX" -- the pornography of power.
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(Laughter)
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So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists,
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"What percent of American citizens would go to the end?"
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They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior,
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and we know, psychiatry knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic.
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OK. Here's the data. They could not be more wrong.
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Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study.
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Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this.
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In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way,
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90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel.
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What about women? Study 13 -- no different than men.
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So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people
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to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts.
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And it's like a dial on human nature.
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A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient,
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down to the majority, down to none.
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So what are the external parallels? For all research is artificial.
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What's the validity in the real world?
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912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered
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by family and friends in Guyana jungle in 1978,
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because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor --
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not their priest -- their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones.
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He persuaded them to commit mass suicide.
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And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect,
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a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death.
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Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people.
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Most of the time, we are in institutions,
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so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions
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to influence individual behavior.
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Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class
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in James Monroe in the Bronx, 1954.