Lecture with Philip Zimbardo - How good people become evil

I just came home from a brilliant lecture by Philip Zimbardo, a professor in social psychology at Stanford University, US (see picture). Rarely do I attend lectures that are as informative and above all inspirational as his, if you ever get the chance to listen to him, don't hesitate.

The lecture today which was held in Lund, where he is going to receive an honorary doctorate, had three parts in it. The first, and the most shocking was about evil and the psychology of evil. Zimbardo's hypothesis is that evil act are often a result of situational factors (rather than say the personality of the individual). He provided a detailed account of the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) that he conducted back in the 70s. In this experiment ordinary healthy youngsters were assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a fake but realistic prison setting. The original plan was that the prisoners would be incarcerated for two weeks, however, after six days the guards abusive behavior had completely broken down the prisoners and the experiment had to be halted (see video). 

In todays lecture more focus was put on another episode which lends support to Zimbardo's hypothesis, namely the horrendeous abuse that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The night shift which was never supervised by superior officers abused prisoners in a truly creative and sadistic fashion. Furhtermore, as is evident when you look at pictures from this episode (you can simply google "Abu Ghraib" if you want to see them) the guards appeared to take joy in these acts. Some pictures shows smiling guards giving thumbs up over a pile of naked and tormented prisoners...

What are the situational factors that contribute to this type of evil? Well accoring to Philip Zimbardo one factor is deindividuation - making peope anonymous. In the stanford prison experiment guards were dressed in uniform and were asked to wear reflective sunglasses, and prisoners were referred to by number - never name. Also important was the absence of checks, which was especially evident in Iraq. No superior officers ever came to check on the night shift -  had someone done so it is likely that the abuse would have been reported. To further drive this message home, Zimbardo points out that anthropological studies show that cultures were it is custom to change the appearence of soldiers (normally assimilating them into some sort of standard), are much more aggressive and lethal than cultures were you are the same person when you are home with your familiy and when you are a warrior - such cultures show less aggression in conflict.  

Despite these insights into the darkness of humanity - Zimbardo wants to give us an optimistic message - namely that it does not take alot to become a hero. Forget about Batman, Superman and also forget about Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Mother Theresa (who may not have been a very nice woman after all). Sure, these persons and superheros are great, but according to Zimbardo most heroes are ordinary folks who find themselves in an extreme situation and then decide to act the way they ougth to. In Abu Graib the heroic act occured when Joe Darby saw the pictures and decided that he had to stop the abuse.  

Consciousness is a byproduct

Intuitively most people think that what we do is mediated by our consciousness. In other words, when I decide to raise my arm it is because I made some sort of conscious choice in my brain which then resulted in signals going down my corticospinal motor pathway and out to the muscles in my arm. 

I think that this is wrong. What is going on rahter, is that after the signal telling my muscles to contract have left my brain, then we become aware that this is the case. In other words being aware of what you do is merely a sort of byproduct, or epiphenomenon if you want to use a more academic language.

What is the evidence for this you might ask and I may answer what evidence do you have to support that our conscience can move an arm? However, I can do better than that because it turns out that there is indeed experimental evidence, produced by Benjamin Libet, suggesting that our consciousness is a byproduct. Benjamin Libet's subject were asked to do a very simple motor task, namely flex their index finger, they could to this whenever they wanted to. Libet wanted to measure the timing of three things, first when the muscle activity in the finger started, he did this using EMG electrodes which has high precision. The second variable he wanted to measure was when the brain activity leading to the action started, this was done using EEG scalp electrodes which like EMG has high temporal precision in the millisecond range. The third and perhaps most crucial variable Libet wanted to measure was when the conscious intention to flex the finger came. To do this he had a type of clock in which one arm would go a full revolution in 2,5 seconds. His subjects were told to report where the arm on this clock was when they first intended flex their finger. 

One would expect that if indeed we first intend to do something and then do it (which is a very intuitive scenario I will admit), if this is so then the flexing of the finger should occur subsequent to when the subject reported their intention. However, this was not the case, rather the flexing of the finger occured quite a while (approximately 500 milliseconds) before the conscious intention. The conclusion from this is that the brain knows that it is going to do something before the person does, or to be more precise, the part of the brain that handles motor initiation first do its thing, then after that the information is given to the part of the brain that mediates conscious awareness.

Many people when they hear this draw very radical conclusions, such as, why should we punish people if they do not have free will, or why should I care about anything, or do anything, what prevents me from becoming a nihilist. I one thinks about it, these conclusions are (at least in my opinion), unwarrented, but nevertheless interesting. I have touched upon these subjects before Perhaps they will be the topic of a later post...

The pope: condoms don't help against HIV

It is perhaps old news that the Catholic Church is not a fan of condoms; however, they are rarely as blunt about it as the other day. Pope Benedictines, a man who seems to be dreaming of past times (medieval times), has now publicly announced that condoms is not the way to go if you want to stop HIV. Indeed, the pope is even claiming that condoms make the problem worse because people have more sex.

What evidence does he have for this claim? None, of course, the Catholic Church does not seem to know what evidence means. Their method for finding the truth is asking the pope and whatever he says is the truth, never mind that there are numerous studies showing that the pope is simply wrong in his statement.

Rarely does the distinction between the scientific method and the catholic (or religious) way become so clear. Do you want to trust what the pope says just because he is the pope, or do you want to trust people who have actually gone out and looked at the effects of condom use? Know that choosing the latter will make you a heretic in the eyes of the Catholic Church. Religion or Science? Irrationality or Rationality? Your choice...

States in bad shape = religiosity

A recent Gallup poll has shown an impressive positive correlation between how religious the inhabitants are and how bad they are of. In other words, this means that if you have a nation that is in a poor state, then your people are likely to turn to religion for guidance, or meaning or whatever you would like to call it. There is of course another possibility namely that first a people become religious, and then the state starts to tear apart. I personally don't believe in the latter possibility, rather, as I have argued here, I think that religion is where people who have lost meaning try to find their answers.

This gallup poll should also be seen as an important piece of information in the debate on whether religion makes people happier. There are indeed a few studies that have looked at this, and they tend to show that people who have religion, everything else being equal, are happier than people who are not religous. 

This gallup poll shows, however, that on a global scale, religious people are not happier than non-religious people (assuming that the average citizen in Bangladesh or Congo kinshasa are not as happy as the average American or Swede). 

Good, free, applications for Nokia N95, symbian & java

Here is another post which may not exactly fit the profile of my blog however I know that many people are looking for good programs to their mobile and I have tried many different programs.

Below I have listed my favorites (some I have mentioned previously).

From Beta labs (free programs from Nokia)
1. Sports Tracker (application can be found at beta labs). This program I have written about before here. Basically it lets you record all of your training activity and it works very nicely with the GPS - allowing you to see exactly where you are. The most neat features you will detect when you run the same track more than once. When you do this you can compete with yourself, see how far ahead (or behind) you are compared to last time (or another time if you prefer). For me this is a great motivator...

2. Audiobook player. I have briefly mentioned this application before as well. It allows you to reduce the size of an audiobook to about one fifth, and the audiobook player that you install on the phone can keep track of where you are in many different books simultaneously. I use this application to listen to all my teaching company courses in the car or in the kitchen. Well done beta labs!

3. Wellness Diary. Yet another application from beta labs. This little program will keep track of and plot graphs on any health related variable including but not limited to, hours of sleep, steps per day, calori intake, waist circumference, weight, hours of exercise, stress etc etc. This app also works great with both sports tracker (see above) and step counter (see below). When you start wellness diary it will automatically import data from step counter and sports tracker.

4. Step counter. This is a very simple app which consumes very little energy. It simply counts every step you take and keep track of the records. This will alow you to see when you are getting lazy which, I have to admit, I have been the last couple of weeks.


From m-google.com
1. Gmaps mobile (can be found a m.google.com). This application is absolutely amazing. It works like google maps and you can easily search for a company on the selected region and then get the number and adress. It also provides a navigation function (without speech), however, you have to pay for traffic fees. The program also is fast and convenient in every way imaginable.

2. Gmail mobile (also at m.google.com). Good applicaiton which will make it easy to check your email if you are using gmail.

From other sites (see for instance getjar or freeware symbian)
1. Fring. This program is a bit slow and seem to have a few bugs however, it has allowed me to do skype calls directly from my mobile phone (an internet connection is required). This makes it affordable to call to my family in Denmark. Also integrated is msn messenger but I cannot write very fast on my mobile phone.

2. Energy profiler. This program lets you see, in real time, how much energy the phone is consuming. It also shows the total capacity of the battery and an estimation of how long the battery will last if the average energy consumption remain the same.

Stop watch. Good to have since it is not on the phone when it comes from the store.

Smarshopper. This is another very simple but very useful piece of software for people like me who like to use their memory resources on philosophical speculation rather than remembering to buy toilet paper. When you have entered something you want to buy it will remember that item. You can then make a mark next to all the items that you want to buy which then results in a list. Click on the items in the list and they will dissapear again.

Skyfire. This is my favorite mobile internet explorer. It is superior in that the experience is much more similar to surfing the net on a PC, and you are able to watch pretty much any video on the net.

Getjar apps. Good application for finding other applications.

Chaos Theory - Not a problem for a deterministic world view

I believe that our universe is deterministic, everything that happens has a preceeding cause, including our thoughts and behavior. Now many people object to this view on the basis of pure intuition i.e. it certainly feels as if I have free will therefore it must be so, but for reasons I will not write about now this is really a poor argument...


There are other less non-sensical arguments against the idea that the universe is determined and that there hence is no such thing as "free will" (depending on how you define that of course). One argument that I would not be able to meet completely is that at the quatum level there is the uncertainty principle according to which we cannot know the speed and the position of an electron simultaneously. All I can say is that I don't think this uncertainty translates into free will for human beings...

Another argument against free will is based on chaos theory. Chaos theory states that there are systems in the world which are unpredictable. At least that is what many people think chaos theory states, but this is not entirely true, rather chaos theory states that in some systems, more information about different variables will only make your predictions a tiny winy bit better... Let me explain.

The last couple of decades computers have become alot better and a lot faster. In spite of this fantastic development we have not seen a marked increase in weather predictions even though weather predictions are made by some quite powerful computers. This is because weather is a chaotic system. Very subtle differences in certain variables (humidity, winds and what not), can have huge effects in how the weather turns out. The old way of predicting the weather, "the weather tomorrow will be like the weather today", still comes close to the predictions of the best supercomputers.

Nevertheless, if Laplace's demon did exist i.e. if we knew the exact position of all particles in the universe and their velocity, if we did know that we would be able to predict the weather for as long as we wanted to and thus there is really no contradiction with a deterministic world view. All that chaos thery really means is that some systems are very sensitive to initial conditions and we are not well enough equipped to see these differences...


I have as some of you may have noticed not written for quite some time, the reason is that I have become a father. My daughter Lola was born on january 13th and me and my wife have been very busy taking care of her. We will see how much I write the coming months but my blog is not dead...

More Teaching Company Reviews

"Imagine how much you could learn if you spent just 30 minutes a day for the next year in the best college classrooms in the world".

I have written quite a lot about the Teaching Company which is a company that I genuinely love. They have completely revolutionized my life and the amount I have learned by listening to these lectures is absolutely staggering, no doubt about it. Forget about boring high-school teachers who cannot explain their subject and who have no desire to give you knowledge and wisdom, the teachers recruited by the teaching company are absolutely top-notch.

Here I thought I would just add a few reviews of courses that I have been listening to since last time:

Wisdom of History 5: I am currently listening to this course taught by Rufus Fears. In it he goes through many episodes in history in a very entertaining fashion and he tells us about the lessons that can be drawn from history such as "Freedom is not a universal value, power is".

Famous Greeks 4: If you get one of the courses taught by Rufus Fears you can expect terrific entertainment as well as many moral lessons. His story telling ability is marvelous and he even makes voices to some of the characters. In this course you will learn about many fascinating ancient Greeks

Famous Romans 5: This course is very similar to the one about famous Greeks and it is also taught by Rufus Fears. For some reason I think that this one is even better, perhaps because I find Ceasar, Cicero, Hannibal, Scipio and the like even more fascinating than the Greek personalities, fantastic course!

Sensation and perception 5: I may be somewhat biased in judging this course since I have been using it when I am myself teaching – reviewing different sensory systems. Professor Coalvita turns a subject that I recall as not very interesting into a subject that is extremely interesting. Perfect for me as a researcher in neuroscience.

New Testament 5: I could not have asked for a better book about the New testament. The professor goes into depth about the content of the New testament as well as other sources of historical evidence. Highly recommended

Great ideas of Psychology 5: Great Great course! Daniel Robinson is one of the very best teachers in the teaching company series and this course goes through pretty much everything you learn in an introductory psychology course.

Foundations of Western civilization P1 3: Although this is a very good series of lectures with a lot of content, the teachers was unable to hold my attention for some reason, perhaps it is just me…

Foundations of Western civilization P2 5: This course which covers the period from 1500-2000 approximately is truly great. Unlike the teacher in the first part of this series, the teacher here never loses my attention, highly recommended course if you want to understand why the world looks the way it does today!

Free will vs determinism 5: I am also currently listening to this one and the first few lecture have been great so I will go ahead and just recommend it. It may be however, that I am biased here since the topic is one that I find very interesting.