Stanford Prision

I believe that the Stanford Prison experiment showed us that good people can place a sense of duty above what they know is right. The "prisoners" probably acted less violently than they would in reality because they didn't want to be guilty for not playing their part in the experiment. In the same vein, the "jailers" probably acted in a more cruel way than they would in real life due to a desire to effectively play a part in the experiment that was sufficiently different from their everyday life and individual personalities.

Experiments like these show us the dangers of classifying people as categorically evil or categorically weak. Situational pressures are extremely powerful.