ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one of the key debates within social psychology. It discusses influences on terrorism, in particular, the Internet. According to Miller, from a social psychological perspective, good and evil are complex concepts. They seem to reside within individuals, in their very ‘’natures’’ or their motives, but also in their actions and in the judgements and interpretations of those who observe their deeds. Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues expected to find evidence that would allow them to reject the dispositional hypothesis in favour of the situational hypothesis: it’s the conditions of prison that are to blame, not the people in them. The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) seemed to show that human beings have an inherent tendency to act as the passive vehicles, indeed victims, of social structures and forces over which they have no control and which constrain their actions. However, this denies the capacity for human agency and choice.
