Explore how Albert Bandura's findings on dehumanization and aggression reinforce Philip Zimbardo's views on situational influences leading to immoral behavior, such as those seen in the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib abuses.
Albert Bandura's 1975 experiment demonstrated that dehumanizing labels increase aggressive behavior. In the study, college students who overheard others being called “animals” were more likely to administer what they believed were higher electric shocks to those labeled, compared to when the same individuals were called “nice.” This supports Zimbardo's theory that dehumanization and labeling play a key role in seducing ordinary people into immoral or evil actions.
Zimbardo argued that social situations can transform good people into perpetrators of harm by providing an ideology that justifies evil, encouraging small initial harmful steps, promoting obedience to perceived just authority figures, and relabeling harmful actions as acceptable or even helpful. Bandura’s findings that aggression increases when victims are dehumanized illustrate one of these mechanisms: when people stop seeing others as fully human, it's easier to harm them without guilt.
Therefore, Bandura’s experiment aligns best with option A: they illustrate the idea that people are more likely to hurt those they see as less than human. This supports Zimbardo's broader theory that immoral behavior often arises not from inherent evilness but from the effects of situational forces like dehumanization, anonymity, social influence, and role expectations.