The Power of the Situation

The Power of the Situation

Jonathon A. Rice

PHI2630

Word Count: 1,446

“The Power of the Situation” is about Philip Zimbardo’s Standford Prison experiment and how situational factors can influence human behavior. Zimbardo’s stance on human ethics and virtues is that humans are neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’ because they have the capacity to do either, especially depending on the situation they are in. The Lucifer Effect is the term Zimbardo used to explain how ‘good’ people can be caused to perform evil acts. He gets the name from the story of the Old Testament on how God’s favorite angel was turned into the devil.

In “The Power of the Situation” Zimbardo speaks about an experiment in 1939 which was one of the first experiments of modern social psychology. This experiment was trying to determine the effects of different styles of leadership. In this experiment they use three groups of small children, one led by an authoritative group leader, another by a democratic style leader and finally a leader that allowed complete freedom of the children. After six weeks they would cycle the three leaders to all of the groups to eliminate the effects that individual personality traits would have on the experiment. They found that no matter what group had the authoritative leader they produced the most amount of hard labor and rough relationships, but only when the leader was around. The democratic leader produced the most creativity and positive relationships while the lack of a leader produced no productivity at all. While this experiment was used to determine the best type of leadership, which they gladly found to be democratic styled leadership, it also yielded other results. This experiment was one of the first to show that the power of the situation can influence people’s personalities and decisions.

Experiments like the one done on the small children, Stanley Milgram’s shock experiment and the Nazis during the Second World War led Philip Zimbardo to investigate...