Mark Buchanan author of “How People Turn Monstrous” is an article about a study conducted at Stanford in the 1970s to show how, under certain conditions, it is human nature to turn monstrous, give in to primal and devilish urges to torture, and dehumanize others. The point of the study was essentially to see what would occur if they were to successfully take away the students individuality. As Buchanan says, “What happened was truly disconcerting,” because within a day and a half the guards, which were really students, hired to play guards, abused of the prisoners and became more and more violent with them. What seems to be the case is that given the power, more often than not people will abuse of the power to the point where it eventually turns them into monsters.
I feel like Buchanan makes a good argument, although the study was done decades ago humans are still the same and the way we act has not changed very much. To prove his point and back up the study he uses evidence from a newer case, the one of the American soldiers and staff sergeant who were found guilty of assault, conspiracy, dereliction of duty, and maltreatment of detainees. This is a perfect example because the soldiers, although trained to kill, are not bad people, but the situation they are put in allows them to transform into something that they may not be.
Overall, I felt like Buchanan proved valid points about humans becoming “moral monsters” given the right circumstances, and he did well at using that to defend Sgt. Fredrick and the other American soldiers. As Buchanan says, “none of us know that we’d have acted differently.”
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