Why Do Good People Do Bad Things?

Why do good people do bad things? Now, in order to really explore this question, you're gonna have to open your mind a little bit, get a little bit of flexibility and a big heaping dose of self honesty. For those of you who are new here, welcome to Put the Shovel down, the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you're always five steps ahead of it and you can get back living the life that you want to live. Okay, so back to our really big, deep question of the day. The first thing that you got to wrap your head around is that good people are capable of doing bad things. In fact, all people do do bad things. I want you to think for just a moment about some of the really bad things or thing that you have done. Don't worry, you're not going to have to say it out loud. Just think about it. You feel kind of squirmy inside, don't you? You feel that uncomfortableness and that shame. We've all made bad decisions. We've all done bad things. But when it comes to ourselves, it's pretty easy for us to think about all the reasons why we made that bad choice or what led up to that bad decision that we made. It's easy for us to justify our own behaviors, but in general, we're not nearly as empathetic with other people, especially when the choices that they've made are on display for others to judge. I've got a good deal of experience with this topic because, number one, I'm human and I've done bad things, too. And number two, in my professional life, I work with people who have addictions, and almost all of them are really good people who find themselves in a bad situation. And because they're in that bad situation, it leads them to making bad choices. I know it's a real comfortable place for us to be to think, oh, bad people are the ones that do bad things. They're those different people out there who are just capable of cold, callous, mean behavior, whatever you want to call it. And yeah, it's true, there are a few people out there who are just cold, callous, mean, bad people. That's true. But that really is the tiny, tiny, tiny, tiniest majority of the people out there. If you really want to make sure that you or your children make good choices and don't find yourself making bad decisions or doing bad things, then the first thing you have to realize is you have to come to terms with the fact that you or your children are capable of doing Bad things. There is a ton of history and research to prove it. Now, in this video, we're going to take a look at three situations that might cause a good person to make a bad decision. And I really hope you listen to this whole video because when you understand these things, you're so much more likely to be able to make a good decision, even in a bad situation. Okay. The first thing that can make a person make bad decisions is when anyone gets put in this lower state of being called survival. So you have these three parts of your brain. You have this frontal lobe, the part that most people think of when they think of their brain. And that's responsible for critical decision making, thinking through impulse control, stuff like that. When you're using that part of your brain, you're less likely to make bad decisions. Now, in the middle of your brain, the center part is your limbic brain. And that's the emotional part of your brain. Now if you get that part of your brain overly excited or threatened or scared or fearful in some way, that part of the brain will then overrule the thinking part of the brain. Because for biological reasons, we're designed to be able to sense things that we should be fearful to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves alive, to protect our families. And we all have those basic survival instincts. And when that part of ourselves is activated, we can make all kinds of really bad, crazy decisions. Now, for the most part, like if you're in a life threatening situation, obviously that fear reflex part of your brain may make you make decisions that you wouldn't make otherwise. But sometimes you're just in that fight or flight zone. Well, that's what happens to people with addictions. They stay almost pretty constantly in that fight or flight emotional part of their brain. And remember that part of our brain, of anyone's brain, is stronger than the thinking part. So it's activates that strong part of the brain, that emotional part, and it overrules the thinking part. That's reason number one. While people make bad decisions and people do bad things. Reason number two that results in a lot of good people making bad decisions is when they feel like they're put into a position to have to make a bad decision. A really great example of this is an old psychological study that you may have heard about like in psychology class in high school or college or something where this experiment was ran. The experiment went like this. So they brought in people and they told the people that they were going to be testing memory. And so the test subjects were told that they were going to be testing the memory of this other group of test subjects. And what they would do is they would have them memorize certain things, and if they got them the answer wrong, then they were to administer a low level of shock every time the person got the answer wrong. Now, in reality, there was no other person behind the curtain being shocked. There was a researcher back there who would respond to the shocks and respond to the memory questions, but they weren't really being shocked. But the person that the experiment was being done on, they didn't know this. So they basically set it up like this. They're looking at this board in front of them that has these buttons, and the buttons correspond to higher and higher and higher levels of shock. So the first time the person gets the question wrong, you're supposed to administer this really low level of shock. And then as they get more and more and more answers wrong, you're supposed to increase the voltage of that shock. Now, in order to make sure that the person being experimented on really understood is they would administer a tiny little like the low voltage shock to them. So they would know, oh, this is like a real thing. It really happens. Now here's the important part of this study. So someone comes in, the supposed, like research director or doctor. But somebody comes in in this white coat, like with a clipboard or something. They look official and they're standing there and they're instructing the person on what to do. So the experiment starts out slow, right? The person gets a question wrong, you administer a little shock and you might hear them yelp or screech or say, ow, that hurts. And then the person gets the next question wrong and they administer the next highest shock. Well, when this experiment was carried out, the thought was is that not very many people would go all the way to the highest voltage of shock. In fact, that just a very small percentage of people would go all the way up the scale. But this study really yielded shocking results. What they found out is that the majority of people went all the way to the highest level of shocking, and they thought they were given a very high level, painful shock, but they did it. You know why they did it? Because someone was just standing there telling them to do it. Now this someone may have looked official, they may have had on a white coat, they may have had a clipboard, but no one was making them do this. They could have left the room. They didn't ask for the credentials of the other person. They could have done any number of things. But most people blindly obeyed the authority. And a lot of that's because people are just responding to this sort of subconscious, really enculturated belief that you obey authority, you do what you're supposed to do, or you do what you said you were going to do. You said you're going to do experiments, so you do it. Or this person's telling you you have to, even though there's no real reason for that to happen. Now, the third and maybe even the most shocking and scary reason why good people make bad decisions and is something that you can think of like the mob mentality. Now, there's a lot of science research and history to show this effect too. When you put people in a big group together and those people are having very strong, intense emotions, it's as if those emotions are viral, they grow, they spread, and it gets everyone going when you think about things like riots or war crimes. In fact, there's this really great TED Talk video by this guy named Vincent Zombardo. And he wrote a book called the Psychology of Evil. And I really encourage you guys to watch this. I'll put the link in the description. And he has this line in the talk, which I really love it. He says, you know, most people, you've heard the saying, one bad apple ruins the whole bunch. What he says is that's not true, that it's not one bad apple ruining the whole bunch. It's the barrel. It's the circumstance that you put people in. And under the right circumstances, people do bad things. And it gives this really difficult to understand graphic example about some American SALT soldiers who did some very horrific things to some prisoners of war. And you have to watch the video to see all about that. But you've got this whole group of young soldiers who've been put in this position of power. And these young soldiers do some really horrible things. Now, another really great research example of this is another study done by Vincent Zimbardo. Don't know if I'm saying that right. And he was involved in something a long time ago called the Stanford Prison Experiment, where they took these two groups of young male college students and they randomly assigned the college students into two groups. One group would be the prison guards and one group would be the prisoners. Now, the group that were the prisoners, they didn't know this, but once they signed up for the experiment, they didn't know what I was going to be involved. But the way it played out was real life police officers would come in the police car to the homes of the young men involved in the study that were going to be the prisoners. And they would arrest them in front of their whole neighborhood, community, families. They put handcuffs on them, put them in the back of the cop car, and took them to this makeshift prison of sorts. Now, there's absolutely no difference in the kids that were picked to be the prisoners. And these were young people, probably in their late teens or early 20s because they were college students. Now, one thing they did was work really hard to make sure they picked a pretty normal, average group of young men, and they randomly assigned them to who was going to be prisoner and who was going to be prison guard. So it's not like they picked bad people to be prisoners or they picked bad people to be prison guards. They purposefully did not do that. And they told the prison guard group that they had to make sure the prisoners stayed in line. And they gave them some rules and qualifications of some things that had to be done, and they basically just set them free and videotaped what happened. And when you watch that experiment, it actually had to be stopped early because so many bad things were happening. The prison guard students, because they had that power and authority, began to abuse that power and authority and did some very, very abusive things to the students that were the prisoners in that study. I'm telling you, you will be shocked when you take a look at this. So if you consider yourself a good person and you want to stay a good person or you want to raise good children, make sure that your children and yourself understand the kind of circumstances that can create this type of environment. Now, this is a subject I think about a lot because of the work that I do, but I've been thinking about it a lot more because a lot of, you know, I watch a lot of true crime videos, and I've made a few videos of my own recently talking about addiction, mental health and how that plays in. And, you know, what's really brought this to my attention is the way that people comment on those videos. It is so extreme and judgmental, and people just want to view these crimes, these people, all these different things that happen in these real black and white terms. And I know it's a lot easier and more comfortable to look at things that way, but life is complicated, and humans are humans, and we are all capable of doing bad things. And thankfully, we're all capable of doing good things, too. So, up next, I've got a video for you on how to nurture that really good part of yourself that's going to help you feel better and be a better person.