While driving today, I turned on NPR and happened upon an interview with Philip Zimbardo who wrote “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It was an amazing interview and a enlightening look into mans nature. I loved how he ended the interview on using heroism to combat the evil tendencies of our culture. I highly recommend you listen to the interview on NPR, you can goto the web page here, and then click the “Listen Now” button.
Hey! I heard them announcing that but haven’t had a chance to listen. However, i followed your handy link to the author’s page and was stunned to find he was the one who did the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’ve been hearing about that, and talking about it for years. Truly amazing. It blows me away how little people in general think about human behavior, and about their own behavior. How else are we to understand and change what’s going on if we don’t understand the dominant species on the planet?
And a recommendation for you in exchange: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s about the decisions we make before we know it, in those first nanoseconds. When the cops see a “perp” reach into his pocket and six of them riddle the guy with bullets only to find he was reaching for his wallet… how did they all make the same mistake? It’s about the prejudices we don’t realize we’re carrying, the choices we may not realize we are making. Fascinating. By the same guy who wrote The Tipping Point (which i also recommend highly).
Hehe, I agree, Blink is a good recommendation, I listened to Malcom Gladwell speak at SXSW in 2005, and I was so intrigued, that I decided to purchase his book.