No One Is All Wicked, or All Good

If you’ve seen the second installment of "Wicked," called “Wicked for Good,” you may be thinking now about how hard it can be to separate the “wicked” from the “good.” This duality that feeds the narrative of this movie doesn't stop at the title but carries throughout the entire plot. No spoilers here, in case you haven’t seen it yet, but suffice it to say that it’s not always clear who’s the “good” witch and who’s the “wicked” one.

The struggle between forces of good and evil occupies not only fiction but also much of psychology. Lack of a clear differentiation is what makes this duality so fascinating. When you’re a child, the world is composed mostly of right vs. wrong, but as you develop into adulthood, you realize for yourself that there are plenty of gray areas.

The Utilitarian Dilemma

One of the murkiest of all gray areas involves moral decision-making. You may be familiar with some of the classic studies in developmental psychology in which children and adolescents are asked whether “Hans,” whose wife is dying of cancer, should steal an expensive drug rather than let his wife die. Stealing is illegal, but it is also morally wrong to let another person die, whether wife or not, which only makes it more of a dilemma.

Updates to this paradigm now take the form of what are called “sacrificial moral dilemmas,” such as what's called the Trolley Problem. A trolley is speeding down the track and will kill five people unless you, at the switch, pull a lever that sets the trolley down another track, killing just one unfortunate person standing in the way. The so-called “utilitarian” solution is to pull the lever to save the five but kill the one, and this is what most people opt for. The “deontological” choice is to let the trolley ride down the track, hurting more people but not involving personal responsibility by your actions.

This problem is so popular among philosophers and psychologists that it was featured in an episode of “The Good Place” where the lead characters rode an actual trolley showing the graphic results of either choice.

Morality in the Lab

Believing that this type of problem is too unrealistic to be of any use, Universiteit Gent psychologist Dries Bostyn and colleagues (2025) decided to see what would happen if people were put into situations where the choices they made could affect actual people (ironically, somewhat like "The Good Place" episode). In addition to developing scenario-based situations like the Trolley Problem, the authors set up an experiment in which participants could choose to control how many people (one or two) out of three would receive a “mild electric shock.” If they did nothing, two people would receive the shock. If the participant took action, only one person would get the shock. The shocks were described as “medically safe but painful.”

The entire process was repeated a second time to see if participants would change their option when going through it again. One important detail: Those receiving the shock were hired by the experimenters and had rated the shock as tolerable.

If this conjures up images of the infamous Milgram obedience experiment, that’s not a coincidence. Obviously, the authors were aware that they could be creating a similar ethical conundrum, so they made it clear that all participants were free to discontinue at any time. Participants also were told they would communicate their choice to a computer that would administer the shock. Many controls were put in place to keep everything safe and to be transparent in terms of the ethics of the study itself.

The key question was whether people would behave in a real-life situation the same way they did in the hypothetical scenarios they received before the lab task. The authors also wished to learn whether people would change their minds on the second trial of the shock portion of the study.

Showing the value of hypothetical scenarios, the findings showed that people acted similarly to both hypothetical and real-life dilemmas. However, the shock situation revealed additionally that about one-third of respondents changed their response during the second phase of the shock portion in an effort to “distribute harm equitably” among the research confederates.

Though the dilemma gave participants no choice but to act in a way that would induce harm on another person, the “fairness principle” emerged as being just as important as the contrasting philosophical orientations. When faced with having to act in a "wicked" way, people still tried to wrest some "good" out of the situation.

Another Path to Goodness

All of this can inform in part the idea that good vs. wicked isn’t a straight 50-50 proposition. However, is there something deeper that the theme of "Wicked," not to mention much of fiction, taps into? To understand this process, it can be helpful to refer to the concept of archetypes.

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In Jungian theory, an archetype is a universal theme often represented in a fictional or mythical character. The dueling witches in "Wicked" represent the archetypes of goodness and evil right down to the color scheme that each of them inhabits in their clothes and living spaces.

In a 2025 essay on archetypes and their meaning, Beatenberg (Switzerland) psychologist Patricia Skar writes about the evolution of Jungian theory. She defines archetypes as images that reflect “complexes” within the “brain/mind” that organize our experiences. She concludes, “Thus as we encounter new social and environmental challenges and/or as our brains evolve and become even more complex, we might expect new complexes to arise from the brain’s continual self-organization.”

Whether you’re a Jungian or not, it can be useful to conceptualize the good vs. wicked dilemma in terms of this inner need we have to understand what goes on around us in these dual themes. One reason we enjoy fantastical pieces of fiction that portray these themes is that they give us insight into ourselves and our own innermost urges.

To sum up, when faced with someone who seems all good vs. someone who seems all wicked, taking a more nuanced view may help you reach a happier, if not more realistic, compromise.