Why do people do evil/bad things?

Philip Zimbardo talking at google.  Philip goes in detail on how the power of the situation/environment can influence someone to  commit evil acts.  Contains Milgram and Stanford prison experiments but also shows how people can be hero’s by standing up for what is right.  If you haven’t seen the New York subway hero video it is a must see.

The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment was a seminal series of social psychology exterments conducted at Yale University by psychologist Stanley Milgram.  He measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. You need to have flashplayer enabled to watch this Google video