JBot Mania

On my way into the ritualistic torture that is my job, I was listening to NPR. Normally I CANNOT stand “Engines of Our Ingenuity”. I am certain that, at the least, it’s the theme music that sends me into fits. Whether it goes beyond that to the content or the announcer’s voice, I am still unsure.

Today’s installment was interesting and reminded me of one of the few psychology experiments that I remember reading about in college — the Zimbardo prison experiment. It seems that Dr. Zimbardo has written a new book called “The Lucifer Effect” which was sparked, in no small part, by the incidents at Abu Ghraib.

Here is a link to the transcript of this commentary.

The one snippet that I took away from it and that I find to be quite accurate is this idea:

The next time we hear talk about a few bad apples, we might remember what Zimbardo learned, that bad apples are not always the problem. Sometimes it’s the barrel that holds them.