Under normal circumstances, you are probably not the type of person who would choose to grind innocent fly larvae in a coffee mill just for the fun of it. But imagine that you were forced to watch a very long and boring film, and the larvae killing was your only alternative to dying of boredom.
It’s a slightly strange experiment, but the results were clear enough: a surprising number of people will choose to grind the larvae. According to the scientists behind the experiment, this demonstrates that it takes only a little boredom to bring out the sadist out in many of us.
And if you are a little sadistic, the evidence indicates that it is highly likely you also have other dark traits.
Sadism – where pleasure is taken from inflicting pain or humiliation on others – is just one ingredient of what we might call ‘evil’. In the
