Philip Zimbardo's The Lowest Animals

Philip Zimbardo posed the questions “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” (par. 1). Zimbardo is a renowned psychologist who is a professor at Stanford University. Mark Twain wrote an essay titled “The Lowest Animal” where he answered those questions, and stated that mankind is inherently cruel. Twain argues that since humans have a moral sense of good and bad and still commit wicked acts of cruelty it would mean that humanity is in fact cruel. Twain is right because many psychological experiments have proved this. Some humans may be kind, but the facts and research proving humanity is cruel outweigh and overshadow those people.

Over the past seventy-five years many psychology

Here Stanley Milgram used randomly picked people to be a part of the experiment. He wanted to see how far people were willing to go to please an authoritative figure. Two people were used for the experiment, the teacher and the learner. The roles were assigned by drawing lots, then they would go into seperate rooms. In one room sat the student, he had electrodes attached to his arms. In the other room sat the teacher. The electrodes from the learner were attached to a circuit panel with numbers of volts ranging from fifteen volts to four-hundred fifty volts. The teacher would ask the learner simple memory questions. If he got it right they would move on but if he got it wrong he would be shocked. Every time the teacher shocked the learner the volts would be increased by fifteen

This would mean that when the group with the later invite time would walk up they would see all the food had already been eaten. This caused even more tension between the groups and resulted in physical violence such as fist fights. This also caused the groups to vandalize and steal. As said here by Saul Mcleod, “The Eagles burned the Rattler's flag. Then the next day, the Rattler's ransacked The Eagle's cabin, overturned beds, and stole private property. The groups became so aggressive with each other that the researchers had to physically separate them.” (par. 10). The researchers took notes of how easy it was to turn two similar groups against each other. In two weeks Sherif had kids who did not know each other prior fighting and stealing from each other. The results of this experiment prove humanity is cruel because instead of coming together to help both sides the boys competed to benefit the group they were