If it is said that good and evil are the two sides of the same coin, then the specific situation and the position you are in are the bridge between good and evil. A good person will turn into a heinous bad person under special circumstances, and a bad person may also be transformed into a good person with a strong sense of justice under special conditions. It helps our understanding to look at the real cases of these years: the Nazi concentration camp massacre, the Nanking massacre, the Rwanda massacre, the My Lai village massacre in Vietnam, you know, the "butcher" and "devil" in these events are in another In a situation, maybe a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor. Have all their moral codes failed? Or, to put it another way, is the role of context really that huge? Zimbardo gave the answer to the question. The first is that people's herd mentality is at work. Humans are social animals, and everyone has a need to be accepted by the group. If the group itself is evil, then every individual in the group will lose basic judgment and choose to obey the evil. Not only that, in the experiment, the "prison guards" wore uniform uniforms, so they felt that their true identities were covered up, and this "de-personalization" approach made them a mob, their aggressiveness and violent tendencies. released to the greatest extent possible. Of course, just like everything has a reason, the perpetrator still needs to convince himself before committing atrocities. This requires another important factor - dehumanization. It's easy to understand - do you feel heartache for punishing a pig, a dog? You can imagine that these victims of violence are scum, beasts, and demons, even worse than pigs and dogs. In short, don't treat them as human beings, and the perpetrators will not have any moral burden.
Human nature is good? Human nature is evil? It seems the answer is not so simple. If we regard good as white and evil as black, the Lucifer effect tells us a cruel reality: the human world is never black and white, and often has endless gray. But color science also tells us that when we zoom in on gray infinitely, what we see is still black and white.
Good and evil are still distinct.
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