Oaklee Ohmie

3rd period
Journal #2
1. The author of this work is Philip Zimbardo.
2. The title of the work is When Good People Do Evil. The significance of the title is
that good people cave into authority & do evil. They are susceptible to blind authority
without even realizing it.
3. The work was written in 2007. The important background is that the author is a
professor of psychology well known for experiments done by the psychology of
incarceration. He wrote this because he did conduct these experiments & then created a
book on The Lucifer Effect, also having to do with incarceration.
4. The intended audience may be modern society. How we may look at others &
see how horrible things that they're doing may be, but when we do them, we were just
following orders. Obedience is a very slippery slope in the eyes of Philip Zimbardo
because when do you know that you've crossed the line?
5. The excerpt is a very powerful experiment essay. It explains the experiment that
was conducted, ruling out that 65% of people blindly obey knowing that they're hurting
another human being. But since the supervisor says it's okay, then it obviously is okay.
On our own, we probably would stop. With the influences around us, if one person thinks
it's justifiable, multiple people will. Also, we don't even think that it's possible for mankind
to obey this easily to authority even if they are questioning themselves morally. Goes to
show, even though Hitler was a horrible thing, the followers were doing no different than
following authority blindly. (110 words)
6. This work makes the point that mind control is not one of the most manipulative
systems. But systematic manipulation is, such as confining settings. Evil is persuasive.
7. My overall assessment of the work is that it's very well written. I remember
reading about this a while ago & it's always been one of my favorites. It has such good
points because before he conducted the experiment, most people believed that the
majority of the population would stop before getting to the higher shock levels, but they
did. So they didn't even see that many people doing such a thing. It's very eye opening
because we need to be careful.