Zimbardo: Investigating Social Dynamics

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Investigating Social Dynamics: Power, Conformity, and Obedience INTRODUCTION American Psychologist Philip Zimbardo is known for his Stanford prison study among many other works, one of the most notable being The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. One of Zimbardo’s (2008) influences to write this book came from Stanley Milgram’s experiments that studied blind obedience to authority. In chapter twelve of this book, Zimbardo analyzes these experiments as well as other sociological and psychological studies to investigate the role social dynamics play in influencing power, conformity and obedience. With the previous chapters focusing specifically on the Stanford prison experiment, chapter twelve has significant importance as Zimbardo uses previous research to create theories to explain the results of his study and applies to them to the broader scale of humanity as a whole (Zimbardo 2008). His goal in this chapter is to prove that based on the research he outlines on social psychology; situational forces play a major role in determining human’s actions. For this reason, Zimbardo argues that the vast majority of people, even inherently “good” human beings can do very evil things as a result of the situational forces that surround them. Critical Review Zimbardo (2008) begins the chapter by highlighting the key points in English Scholar C.S. Lewis’s book “The Inner Ring”. He agrees with Lewis’s idea that human beings are naturally motivated by the basic desire to be “in” and not “out”, and that this desire often causes an individual to cross the line between good and evil (Zimbardo 2008). Zimbardo uses examples that range from highly publicized news incidents to popular and more subtle processes such as fraternity initiation rituals to validate this argument. He makes a point to warn the reader to take on an impartial role and suspend any
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