The psychology of evil | Philip Zimbardo

Why HN readers recommended it

HN uses it to argue that systems rather than bad apples drive cruelty, and for its section on how anonymity changes behavior.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

TED

Topic

social psychology of evil

Format

talk

Level

general

HN recommenders in dataset

2

HN mentions in dataset

4

Recommendation years in dataset

2012–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• > The argument that gets repeated ad nauseum, that things like this are the fault of "a few bad apples", is just plain false. Philip Zimbardo, the architect of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author, more recently, of The Lucifer Effect , argues that it's …

• That's the usual naggers club you can meet all over the web today. And it's getting worse, not better. What these people say is an end in itself to make themselves important and does not help the matter. It undoubtedly has something to do with …

• > the most notable difference between Hacker News and Reddit is that it's impossible to downvote anything on Hacker News. [..] It's an interesting design decision, but ultimately a bad one, in my opinion. That's not true (as the author realized himself). And I don't …