Search results for ""Author Alexander O'Connor""

What makes good people capable of committing bad – even evil – acts? Few psychologists are as well-qualified to answer that question as Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor who was not only the author of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment – which asked two groups of students to assume the roles of prisoners and guards in a makeshift jail, to dramatic effect – but also an active participant in the trial of a US serviceman who took part in the violent abuse of Iraqi prisoners in the wake of the second Gulf War. Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect is an extended analysis that aims to find solutions to the problem of how good people can commit evil acts. Zimbardo used his problem-solving skills to locate the solution to this question in an understanding of two conditions. Firstly, he writes, situational factors (circumstances and setting) must override dispositional ones, meaning that decent and well-meaning people can behave uncharacteristically when placed in unusual or stressful environments. Secondly, good and evil are not alternatives; they are interchangeable. Most people are capable of being both angels and devils, depending on the circumstances.In making this observation, Zimbardo also built on the work of Stanley Milgram, whose own psychological experiments had shown the impact that authority figures can have on determining the actions of their subordinates. Zimbardo's book is a fine example of the importance of asking productive questions that go beyond the theoretical to consider real-world events.

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The work of memory researchers Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch is a prime example of the ways in which good critical thinkers approach questions and the problems they raise. In the 1960s, researchers into human memory began to understand memory as comprising not one, but two systems. The first was a short-term system handling information for mere seconds. The second was a long-term system capable of managing information indefinitely. They also discovered, however, that short-term memory was not simply a ‘filing cabinet,’ as many had thought, but was actively working on cognitive – or mental – tasks. This is how the phrase “working memory” developed. The hypothesis remained unproven, however, presenting Baddeley and Hitch with the problem of working out how to produce definitive evidence that short term memory was a working system that actively manipulated and processed information. They responded by designing a series of ten experiments aimed at showing just this – presenting the results in their 1974 article, ‘Working memory.’ The research was a masterpiece of problem-solving that proved revelatory. The authors not only generated new solutions and made sound decisions between alternative possibilities – they also showed that short-term memory is indeed an active system responsible for information processing and managing, while also influencing attention, reasoning, reading comprehension and learning.While their work has since been refined by others, Baddeley and Hitch’s problem-solving approach helped to create the dominant understanding of working memory that underpins psychological research throughout the world today.

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