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Prison Study, in which ordinary college students, randomly assigned to be full-time guards and prisoners in a temporary prison, nevertheless behaved respectively as abusers and victims (29). Social psychology shows that, whatever their own good or bad choices, most people believe that others would do whatever they personally chose to do, a phenomenon termed false consensus (30, 31). Conformity to the perceived reactions of one’s peers can be defined as good or bad, depending on how well the local norms fit those of larger society.

As every graduate of introductory psychology should know from the Milgram studies (32), ordinary people can engage in incredibly destructive behavior if so ordered by legitimate authority. In those studies, participants acting as teachers frequently followed an experimenter’s orders to punish a supposed learner (actually a confederate) with electric shock, all the way to …