Zimbardo: the myth of human character

‘There’s the myth about human dignity and human character,’ he told me over lunch. ‘So we really want to believe that our actions all stem from some internal set of motives, of goodness, of morality, and courage, and they get perverted in certain situations for certain people. I start with a more simple model, to say that the human mind gives us templates or potentials to be anything at any time, and in fact, any time that somebody does something extraordinarily good or bad, it becomes imaginable for us.

Saved 23 April 2015

#character #human-nature #situation #morality