Are Humans Inherently Evil?

There was a famous psychological experiment back in 1961, known as the Milgram Experiment, which appeared to have proved that people are generally dicks, willing to inflict pain and suffering on others when instructed to by an authority figure, particularly if they didn't think they would be held accountable.

The participants were led to believe that they were delivering potentially deadly shocks to another person. According to Milgram, they were only too happy to do so, despite being able to hear their screams of pain and pleas for them to stop. The study was seen as proof that normal people are perfectly capable of terrible things.

Except the entire thing was a bit of a sham. The often published statistic that 65% of the participants were willing to give someone an electric shock strong enough to kill them is wildly inaccurate, and is a combined, slightly fudged, result from lots of different variations of the experiment.

In actual fact, what happened was that 60% of participants displayed strong empathy, disobeyed the authority figure and refused to continue, despite many of the authority figures resorting to coercion and bullying to get them to continue.

This study is a driving force behind a lot of our ideas about the evil nature of humans, but the results that Milgram reported are actually the opposite of the truth.

Humans have an incredible ability for empathy, we feel the pain and sadness of other people keenly. It is this, rather than fear of punishment, that generally speaking prevents us from clubbing strangers around the head and taking their money, or delivering them 450-volts just because a man in a white coat told us to.