The Man Who Played with Absolute Power
In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. Escher’s Circle Limit IV, a set of black and white tessellated angels and demons. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that “good and evil are the yin and yang of the human condition.” Neither are ever very far away.
Zimbardo rose to fame in 1971 with his Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students role-played guards and prisoners. The experiment was scheduled to last two weeks, but ended within six days after the guards began to abuse the prisoners, some of whom experienced mental breakdowns.
Even Zimbardo himself played a key role in the power structure. “In the experiment, I had ultimate power,” Zimbardo tells me. “I was the one ultimately that intervened and stopped it, [but] I could have intervened, and I should have intervened earlier.” The temptations of power can change an individual, he said—something that, no doubt, was on his mind when he testified in defense
