Inspired by Stanley Milgram’s iconic experiments on obedience, and interested in understanding why people were induced to obey unjust regimes, Psychologist Philip Zimbardo paid college students to participate in a mock prison, as prisoners and guards.
One of the central findings of the study is that individuals only move towards tyranny once they have come to identify with a group and its leadership (in a way that Zimbardo’s briefing of his guards encouraged) and once an authoritarian agenda has come to define that group’s identity and to be seen as a solution to its problems.
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