Stunning exploration into the power of conformity and the darker side of human nature

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	• The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Philip Zimbardo Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008 - 576 pages average customer review:based on 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

It's in us all

The Lucifer Effect is largely a book about the details of the Stanford Prison Experiment in which college students were enlisted to participate in an experiment testing human behavior in incarceration scenarios. This experiment in psychology, conducted by author Philip Zimbardo in 1970, is a widely cited landmark study which showed how a person's situational role is the most important factor determining how they will behave, more important than any predisposition they may have in their personality. Zimbardo's study showed that the environment brings out the evil latent in us all -- something that should disquiet everyone who believes that some people are simply born evil.

Though I can't recall that he explicitly says so, it would seem that Zimbardo wrote this book in response to the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison which became public a few years ago. American officials frequently spun the story to promote the idea that prisoner torture was the handiwork of "a few bad apples." His experience and data with the Stanford Prison Experiment suggest that this is simply untrue. Rather, it was the high stress environment coupled with little to no training for the job at hand and unclear or conflicting directives from higher-ups that created the inevitable outcome. His argument is compelling and and substantial.

Where the book diverges from its apparent purpose is in the last quarter where Zimbardo places members of the Bush administration "on trial" for what happened at Abu Ghraib. While I don't disagree with his assessment of the government's culpability, he allowed his scholarly analysis of the topic of human evil to turn into a political diatribe that might have been better suited to a separate volume.

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Despite Years of Research, we still look for bad people

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment started as an investigation of how being confined to a mock prison would affect normal, well adjusted college students. Zimbardo and his assistants pre-screened 20+ students from the SF Bay area, and randomly assigned half as guards (working three eight hour shifts) and half as prisoners (confined 24/7). He advised the "guards" that they could not use force, but anything else was fair game to control the "prisoners." The "prisoners" were picked up by the palo Alto police, taken to the local police station, printed, blindfolded, and taken to the basement of the Stanford psych building--which had been converted into a mock prison. The "prisoners were stripped, deloused, and put into locked "cells"--converted offices.

After less than a day, it became apparent that the transformation of the "guards" was at least as interesting as the transformation of the prisoners. The "guards" quickly became sadistic in their verbal and psychological abuse of the "prisoners." The "prisoners" quickly became both submissive, and resistant to authority in self destructive ways. Many others who came through the prison (parents of the "prisoners," a public defender, and a priest) all bought into the situation, and played their roles according to Zimbardo's rules. No one stepped outside of the situation and said--"These are college kids; they shouldn't be abused." No student quit. No guard told the other guards to cool their abuse. After less than a week, Zimbardo's fiancé (also a psychologist, but not directly involved in the study) brought Zimbardo back to reality, and the experiment was terminated.

What happened to turn college students into abusive guards/passive prisoners?

Zimbardo has spent his life--and all 500+ pages of this book, explaining that what the Stanford Prison Experiment proved has less to do with prisons (it was a very poor simulation of a prison--everyone knew the experiment would only last 2 weeks, none of the "prisoners" had actually committed any crimes; none was dangerous; no force was allowed); and everything to do with the way institutions impact the behavior of those who work in them. This applies to prisons, but also to many aspects of everyday life--corporate corruption, for example.

After detailing the Stanford Experiment day-by-day, Zimbardo makes a brief detour into general psychology. He quickly returns to prisons--this time Abu Ghraib. Zimbardo testified as an expert for Ivan Frederick, and devotes the last third of the book to an analysis of how the systemic factors established by the military--and the civilians from Rumsfield to Bush--inevitably lead to the abuse which is now known to the world through photographs.

While Zimbardo's approach is no longer considered revolutionary in psychology, almost everyone reflexively still blames bad behavior on bad people. Thus, most people concurred in Bush's statement that the soldiers involved were a few bad apples...and searched for explanations personal to those involved--former work as a correctional officer, mental illness, etc. Zimbardo spends a good part of the book telling us why that is simply wrong. We should look to the situation, and the system in general for an explanation of evil; not to personal disposition to do wrong.

Fine analysis of a fascinating experiment.

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Not bad

Upon first glance you can tell what Dr. Zimbargo set out to do. He wanted to write a book about the dark side in everyone, use examples from real life to illustrate his point and finally provide guidance on how to stay moral. His book however, falls slightly short of this vision.

The main focus of this book is the Standfard Prison Experiment. This was a social psychology study that examined the effects of situational forces on the behaviours and actions of people. It's an interesting study and well worth the time to research on your own. Unfortunately, it doesn't offer many angles when trying to illuminate the dark side of people as a whole.

After a thorough and often-times overly detailed account of this event Dr. Zimbargo offers some insight and explanations into his findings. I thought this was the best part of the book. These are Dr. Zimbargo's own thoughts on paper and they are interesting. Furthermore, he goes onto discuss other social psychology experiments (google "Milgram Experiments")that drew similar conclusions to his study. Unfortunately, this part is not very long.

The next section of the book draws parallels between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the environment at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This part of the book is very dry. By page 300 you've been hit over the head so many times with the Stanford Prison Experiment that it loses its awe factor.

Lastly, Dr. Zimbargo discusses how people can remain good in difficult situations. This part of the book is lacking.

All and all its a decent book. I thought it would've been better if Dr. Zimbargo relied a little less on the Stanford Prison Experiment and a little more on other mediums to explain the impact of situational forces on people.

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An important book of our time.

First let me disclaim that there was a section of the book I did not read because it was incorrectly bound -- it went from page 426 to page 375, but the new p. 375 was different from the one that had preceded it. [I'm guessing that the reason Amazon is out of stock while the book enjoys top 10 status is because they are trying to restock with "good" copies]
Nonetheless, this book is so rich with the details of what can and does go wrong when authority is confered without systems or protocols which bound it to a higher-order,thought-out -- and ethical -- goal.
Other reviews and media coverage will summarize that this book is about the Stanford Prison Experiment and that it shows how good people can turn evil. The book extrapolates these lessons to other grave situations, like Abu Ghraib, and finds this recurring theme popping up repeatedly. That is the flesh of this book.
What I find fascinating, though, is a perhaps deeper current of thought. The book is essentially about the banality of evil -- how it can crop up in ordinarily unremarkable people. However, the truth is that this banality doesn't just apply to people (in extraordinary situations like prisons.) It applies to ordinarily unremarkable situations like schools and places of business. The Lucifer Effect is at work among middle school cliques and Enron-esque corporations. Pure evil, or what Zimbardo calls administrative evil, are not exclusively the results of chaos. The Nazis were pretty systematic. It's not so much the having a system as it is having a quality system. And that seems to be the hard part. The affects which breed toxic environments -- favoring social approval over personal responsibilty, rationalizing behavior in order to maintain group strength or personal position, diluting responsibility by creating democracies, to name a few -- are home base for most mere mortals. In other words, this is the norm rather than the exception. And when in groups, the effect can be like a tidal wave. Zimbardo does end the book with the notion that there are people who buck the tide or blow a whistle. He also has created a chart showing the kind of torment this trend-bucking person will go through depending on the setting. No wonder he categorizes this person as heroic. The take away from this book for me is not so much about prison reform or military oversight. Rather, there is ubiquity to evil-breeding tendencies and it takes the shoring up of more heroic measures in all of us to stave them off. As I said in this review's title, this is an important book of our time

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Stunning exploration into the power of conformity and the darker side of human nature

A stunning read for anyone interested in the darker side of humanity. Zimbardo relates his own Stanford Prison Experiment to the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, cults, and especially his investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's well researched and well written but Zimbardo tends to talk down to his reader and patronize quite a bit. He's also pretty didactic when it comes to his politics, but if you can get past that, it's well worth the read.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it?

Renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The Lucifer Effect he explains how?and the myriad reasons why?we are all susceptible to the lure of ?the dark side.? Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women.

Zimbardo is perhaps best known as the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here, for the first time and in detail, he tells the full story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into ?guards? and ?inmates? and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.

By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the ?bad apple? with that of the ?bad barrel??the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt?s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker?s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior.

From the Hardcover edition.

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