If you had the chance to harm someone and get away with it, would you? History is full of chilling examples that make us question whether people are born evil or made evil. We’d like to believe we’re good people, but the truth is we can justify far more than we realize, even when others see our actions as cruel.
So, the real question is, is evil something we’re born with or something that our environment shapes in us? Let’s find out.
The Stanford prison experiment
Starting with one of psychology’s most famous and disturbing experiments, the Stanford prison experiment. In the pursuit of greater insight into the effects of authoritarianism on morals, one of the most sickening studies that researchers conducted was the Stanford prison experiment.
In the 1970s, controversial psychologist Philip Zimbardo, working with Stanford University, split a group of volunteers into two groups: prisoners and guards. The guards were dressed in uniforms that took away their individuality and, therefore, their culpability as individuals.
Going forward, their actions weren’t reflective of their own morals, but the morals of the group. The prisoners, on the other hand, were given prison uniforms and addressed by the guards as numbers instead of names. This already created a dangerous divide between prisoners and guards. One group is freed from responsibility, and the other is dehumanized.
Guards took every opportunity to make things worse for the prisoners, disrupting their sleep and referring to them as dangerous inmates. Despite them just being ordinary people who volunteered as part of an experiment, as tensions rose, the prisoners’ beds were taken from them. They had to use buckets as toilets. They grew increasingly distressed and suspicious of one another. They were forced to wear bags over their heads. They were forced to do push-ups whenever the guards told them to and were subjected to all kinds of humiliation.
The experiment ended after only 6 days instead of the planned 2 weeks due to ethical concerns and things growing rapidly out of hand. This experiment is widely debated on its validity both scientifically and ethically, but we can learn something from it.
What is the likelihood that every guard was born with that cruelty in them? Instead, it was more likely that opportunity, anonymity, perceived duty, and a power imbalance all contributed to their behavior. There was a 50/50 chance that by signing up, you would be a prisoner or a guard. No one had actually committed a crime. But the role you are given, the identity others prescribe to you, can make you act evil.
If the results of this experiment are to be believed, circumstances definitely play a role in your moral behavior.
The world’s youngest serial killer
If someone can be born evil, surely we would see them performing evil deeds from a young age. This certainly does happen. Children have murdered before. Cruelty in children is a well-documented phenomenon.
The world’s youngest serial killer was an 8-year-old boy, Amarjit Sada from India, too young to be prosecuted, but his crimes were shockingly sophisticated. He took the time to lure his victims and hide the bodies. This suggests that he knew that he was doing something wrong.
In a study examining the biological perspective of the minds of serial killers, researchers suggest that he could have been biologically wired to be more violent. The researchers specifically suggested that he could have an extra Y chromosome, which is a condition that affects behavior and increases the likelihood of the individual committing violent crimes.
Although this evidence is speculative, it does show that people can biologically be predisposed to evil. But if you spend any time looking into serial killers, you’ll likely know that the psychological factors that influence their crimes are often brought out by their upbringing or environment. So without all of the information on Amarjit Sada, we can’t know how his environment influenced him.
So which is it?
After getting walked over, you’re heartbroken or suffering great betrayal, you probably feel like you might snap. But the truth is, as bad as you felt, those things didn’t make you turn evil.
Despite abuse being a factor in many serial killers’ childhoods, not all abuse victims go down that path. If it were so easy to make someone evil, a lot more people would be. But our environments definitely do influence us. Our biological makeup also influences us.
But why do we not see more Amarjit Sadas? Why don’t more abuse victims become evil? Because the way we behave is also up to us. We can be genetically predisposed to aggression. We can be taught by our parents that violence is valid. But while some people truly don’t have any alternatives, most of us do.
Criminologist Lonnie H. Athens writes that the question of nature versus nurture is meaningless because the relationship between these two factors, as it plays out for the individual, is too complex to put a definitive claim on.
The answer
So, to answer the question: people are born evil. People are also made evil, but evil people ultimately decide to do evil things.
It can be tempting to dismiss people like Amarjit Sada as an 8-year-old who didn’t know he was doing something wrong. But if that were true, there would be a lot more cases like this.
So why do you think people are or become evil? What do you think is the biggest influence on morality? Is it authority, genetics, or human nature? Let us know your theories in the comments below.
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