Serial Killers DBQ

Showcased by the branding of serial killers as inherently mentally unstable and dangerous, it can be seen that the majority of the population believes that individuals are affected more by internal forces. However, in reality, this is not the case. While human decisions seem to be dictated by their will because emotion is shown while completing actions, these emotions are dictated by the situation, or in other words, environmental factors. As a result, Dr. Zimbardo’s statement that “Human behavior is more influenced by the things outside of us than inside,” is true.

While a person can be disposed to perform certain types of actions, whether or not these actions are performed is still ultimately decided by the environment that they are in. For

Because the experiment was meant to find out what would happen if good people were put into an evil place, the designation of “the most normal, the most healthy,” was given to the students who were naturally disposed to behave in a way that is traditionally good - helping others and adverse to violence. However, despite these traits, all of the students who participated in the experiment experienced drastic changes in their personalities and actions. After the experiment began, half of the students, who became guards, dehumanized the other half of the students, who became prisoners. In fact, the level at which the prisoners were mistreated was so high that “The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids [Dr. Zimbardo’ team] picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours” (Source E). The kids that had emotional breakdowns were all prisoners. While the context suggests that the emotional breakdown was caused by lack of willpower, the real cause of the emotional breakdown was that the guards, who were previously normal kids with the same traits as

Because genes are hard-coded into a human and cannot be changed, people believe that in certain environments, especially stressful ones, humans will begin acting based on instinct rather than rationality; that people's actions are the product of their own inherent will rather than circumstance. “Instinctive, or hard-wired (i.e., by definition, genetically determined), behavior ...implies that a behavior is performed without thought and cannot be modified by learning.” (Source J). Additionally, people believe that genes not only cause genes to give people a disposition toward certain decisions, but guarantee that those types of decisions will eventually be made. While genes do cause people to have certain personalities and be disposed toward certain things, the rest of the argument is fundamentally false. This is because it ignores one of the core components of genetics: epigenetics. Epigenetics is a part of genetics that determines whether or not a gene is expressed. Even if a person were to have a gene to cause violence, “in order to express this gene, ...you have to be involved in something that is really traumatic -- not a little stress, not being spanked or something, but really seeing violence, or being involved in it, in 3D” (Source D). Essentially, although genetics is hard coded into a person,