Alyssa Fenger
Ms. Schoenleber
English 9
October 22 2014
The Evil Inside
How do people become evil? One cannot be born with evil. Just like Sexton stated in her poem, “
We are born with luck / which is to say with gold in our mouth. / As new and smooth as a grape, / as pure as a pond in Alaska, / as good as the stem of a green bean.”
Evil is something you adapt from oneself or another. Evil can occur when people conform, when someone is powerless, or when one experiences trauma.
When someone conforms, evil can occur in themselves. For example, Cherry explained in her article “Asch Conformity Experiments” how the experimenter shows a person two cards.
One with the right line statement and one with the wrong. There are some actors in the room with the person, so the person is the one being tested on the experiment. The person most of the time answers the right card, but sometimes the other "participants" unanimously choose the answer. The person knows that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer, so you lie about your answer to fit in.
“Asch also found that having one of the confederates give the correct answer while the rest of the confederates gave the incorrect answer dramatically lowered conformity.” Cherry also explains how people react to conformity. She says, “75% of the participants in the conformity experiments went along with the rest of the group.” Even though the students answered the right card, they did not want to be the outsider.

When someone is powerless, evil can occur. Dixon says, “
Adults and children from slave castes in Mauritania are usually illiterate, unaware of their rights and enslaved in domestic labor and as cattle herders, regarded as the property of their masters.
” She is saying

innocent people can be so powerless that they are very easily influenced and are forced to do what their master says. This problem mainly occurs in slavery. Slavery can be anything as follows: “ human trafficking, forced labor, slavery or slavery-like practices”(Dixon). Therefore, when someone is under certain circumstances when they are being pressureed, they may perform acts of evil.

Lastly, evil can occur when people experience