To be against evil, you need to know about the conditions in which any ordinary person becomes evil. The famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo in his speech TED spoke about the psychology of evil and the psychology of the hero.
3 factors that influence evil
To be against evil, you must know the conditions under which evil arises. Evil arises under the influence of three factors:
- man himself, his personal qualities, character;
- feature of the situation, circumstances;
- a system that puts a person in a specific situation and creates the possibility of these situations.
Consider these factors in order.
The first one. In fact, there are few “bad chaffs, ” as Philip Zimbardo put it. Only about 1% of people can just cause harm to another person just because they have such a character or a sadistic personality.
The second one. Situations in which a person is inclined to manifest evil are new, unfamiliar situations. When habitual stereotypes of behavior do not work, they do not fit. No one is safe from this. However, in every unfamiliar situation, we have a choice: to indulge evil or to oppose it, to prove ourselves a hero.
The third. Evil is the result of a system that puts a person in certain conditions, gives him power over other people. Evil, according to Philip Zimbardo, is always associated with power, with the ability to use it in relation to other people.