Why And How Normal People Go Mad
Just about any ordinary person can slip into madness, believes APA President Philip G. Zimbardo, PhD. In fact, all it may take to trigger the process is a special kind of blow to one's self-image to push someone over the edge of sanity.
"My colleagues and I have demonstrated that situational forces...can generate surprisingly powerful contributions to make good people behave in bad ways," he said to a standing-room-only crowd in his presentation, "Why and how normal people go mad," at APA's 2002 Annual Convention in Chicago.
The basis for his ideas is his discontinuity theory, which posits that when people perceive a violation in some domain of functioning vital to their sense of self-esteem, they will search for ways to explain or rationalize the experience. An A-student who suddenly gets poor grades, for example, may develop sexual or eating problems, or exhibit violent fantasies--symptoms that could...