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Letters
Friday, April 27, 2007 12:00 AM

My sister has become a monster cop!

She's a rootin'-tootin', two-gun-totin', perp-bashin' sheriff's deputy and I'm, like, where'd this come from?

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  • Friday, April 27, 2007 07:24 AM

    Remember the Stanford Prison Experiment?

    Michael Bowen, I think to say that she was "always a monster" is unnecessarily harsh. People have an overwhelming tendency to say that bad behavior on the part of others is due to some sort of "innate" evil quality. Yet experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment and that Yale study (I can't remember the name, it was re Nazis, where people would continue to administer shocks to someone they could not see because they were told to do so) show that ordinary people, otherwise "good" people, when put in situations with a bad power dynamics, will behave very badly. The "monster" qualities exhibited by LW's sister may be just as much a function of the power dynamic in her current job as anything within her personally.

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