Situation and our Behavior: What Are We Really Capable Of?
John Moroney

Situation and our Behavior: What Are We Really Capable Of?
The Power of The Situation was an incredible look at the influence a particular situation might have on an individual. The narrator Phillip Zimbardo, a well-known psychologist, exposed different, and sometimes shocking, behavior patterns humans’ display in different environments and implications. He showed how psychologists have studied and observed these behavioral changes throughout various experiments. While I have a basic understanding of the human brain, I was very surprised to see evidence of drastic behavior changes in otherwise “normal” human beings.
The video focused on several psychological experiments that focused on a subject’s behavior, and whether or not their situation was affecting that. Zimbardo questioned whether an ordinary human being off the street could have the power of becoming a dictator whose wrath could match that of a Nazi general. A test subject was instructed to “teach” a student, if the student did not get the question right, the test subject was allowed to shock the student in various amounts of painful voltages. Contrary to the conductors of the researches previous assumptions, the test subjects proceeded to very lethal amounts of voltage without hesitation. It was not until the “student” painfully begged the test subject to stop that the subjects began to become apprehensive. After seeing this video for the first time, I was left wondering why a human would willingly participate such an act. In a more extreme experiment, several groups of young adults were placed into a simulated prison environment. Some individuals were instructed to act as wardens, and the others were prisoners. All individuals knew they were participating in an experiment, but as the procedures advanced, each person’s behavior began to change dramatically. Wardens started to crack down on the prisoners. They sometimes resembled harsh drill instructors, resorting to embarrassing tactics to keep their prisoners subservient. Zimbardo emphasized that none of the test subjects previously possessed any kind of unnatural personality or psychological disorder, so I was surprised to see the subjects display such polarizing behavior in the experiment.
What I learned from the video was that it is important to understand the influence of a person’s role or situation might have on their behavior. Given the opportunity, humans are naturally inclined to act in ways they might not normally act. As displayed in the video, if they are empowered and told they are a fighter pilot, they strain harder to perform than if they were just a person in a sub-par flight simulator. If a group has a careless leader, very little progress