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After finishing the Hunger Games, we are struck by the obvious parallels to our society and wonder if we could behave anything like the teens that are forced to fight in the arena.

Would we be able to kill someone just to make sure we survive? Would we be sadistic like Cato, or derive pleasure from another’s pain, like Clove? Although all of us would like to say that we’d never cross that line between good and evil, I argue that yes, we would.

For example; In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo oversaw the Stanford Prison Experiment. In the study, twenty-four mentally healthy college students were randomly assigned to either be a guard or a prisoner in a mock-jail. Within a short amount of time, however, the guards became so alarmingly abusive towards the prisoners that the two-week experiment was ended after only six days. What was especially disturbing about the guard’s behavior, besides the treatment of the prisoners, was that they were actually “nice guys” in a normal setting. Someone who had known them before would be shocked to see the guards demand endless jumping jacks or force a rule-breaker to stand in a tiny closet for hours.

The extreme setting of the arena-the suspense of knowing that you could die at any second, that only one person can survive -is enough to make anyone “crazy”. Even those of us who are moral and couldn’t imagine killing anyone would most likely become murderers in the Games. Therefore, we can conclude that people like Cato, Clove, and Marvel were most likely average teens and not “bad apples”. Rather, the “bad barrel”–the social setting–caused them to turn evil. Although this idea doesn’t excuse an “evil” person’s actions, it helps us to understand why normally good people do bad things.