Philip Zimbardo

greed, the strong desire for wealth or power over another.

For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme "sins of the wolf," the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it.

It is the opposite of the concept of caritas, which means envisioning oneself as part of a ring of love in which each individual self has worth in itself but also as it relates to every other self.

What cupiditas means is the desire to turn into oneself or take into oneself everything that is "other" than self. For instance, lust and rape are forms of cupiditas, because they entail using another person as a thing to gratify one's own desire; murder for profit is also cupiditas.

Do we give insufficient attention to the outer determinants of our thoughts, feelings, and actions? To what extent are we creatures of the situation, of the moment, of the mob?

I will ask you to reflect upon three issues: How well do you really know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses? Does your self-knowledge come from reviewing your behavior in familiar situations or from being exposed to totally new settings where your old habits are challenged? In the same vein, how well do you really know the people with whom you interact daily: your family, friends, co-workers, and lover?

Our nature can be changed, whether toward the good or the bad side of human nature.

In short, we can learn to become good or evil regardless of our genetic inheritance, personality, or family legacy.'

When faced with some unusual behavior, some unexpected event, some anomaly that doesn't make sense, how do we go about trying to understand it? The traditional approach has been to identify inherent personal qualities that lead to the action: genetic makeup, personality traits, character, free will, and other dispositions.

Social psychologists ask: To what extent can an individual's actions be traced to factors outside the actor, to situational variables and environmental processes unique to a given setting?