You are not who you were ten years ago. You are not who you were one year ago, a month ago, a week ago. The degree of change in yourself may be great or it may be minute, but it is there. Maybe at one time in your life you were prone to anger and now you are more likely to forgive in the same situation. Or unlike the innocence of your childhood you are less likely to trust another human being. If you look back on your life it can seem like an instant. Like a photograph with all the major events blown up in the foreground. But your life has been thousands of days of experience, each moment an influence on who you are. How many times do you remember making a choice during each of those experiences that this is the direction your personality was going to take? How much control do you really have when it comes to what makes you who you are?
In 1971, 24 undergraduates at Stanford University were seriously faced with this question, although they never seemed to know it. All the students that were chosen from an original group of 70 had no criminal backgrounds and lacked any psychological issues. From the beginning each participant was fully aware that the situation they were engaging in was not real. Even the prison was obviously not real, having been constructed in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. Yet within a day the experience of holding a position of power for the “guards” had already shown significant changes in behavior in the individuals. Without any real agenda or guidance on how they were to conduct themselves in a position of power, the guards began to humiliate the prisoners. They would only allow them to identify themselves by their inmate number, and anything seen as a slight disobedience was dealt with immediately and harshly. Push-ups and vocal abuse were the most regular punishment delivered. Some inmates were put in “solitary confinement”. And the others were made to vocally berate them while the individuals stayed in the...