There are no “bad apples”

Recently someone’s asked me about people who significantly influenced my view of life. The first person who came up to my mind was Dr. Philip Zimbardo, the author of the world famous Stanford prison experiment.

According to Dr. Zimbardo – and this thought I happened to share – there are no “bad apples”, there are bad situations that make people villains. Changing those situations is what we all should do due to at least reduce its impact on us as individuals and as members of society.

I want to share his brilliant TED talk. It’s about exercising of power and a role of conformity, about the power of anonymity in committing violence and Abu Ghraib as an example of it.