Question: What gives humans the desire for things like power? Why do humans do evil?

Rebecca Dewey answered on 18 Jun 2015:

We don’t know – everyone has different motivations for why they do things. Some people want to have power and some people want to cause suffering.

In the 1960s and 1970s there were fewer regulations around experiments that could be performed on humans, and anything that wasn’t directly harming a person physically was generally assumed to be ok (now not the case – I have to have all my work checked by an ethics committee before I can do anything!!). Two experiments; Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience to authority figures and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment both recruited normal, non-evil, non-power seeking people. Both experiments eventually caused these normal people to do evil things (to cause what they thought was pain to another person, and to torture, hurt or be disrespectful to another person and deny them their human rights). So the point is, everyone has the potential to do evil – just some people have the urge to actually carry it out, we don’t know why.