Title: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Purchase Item Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $9.99
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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks Autonomy, compassion and listening to counter powerful situational dynamics
In his recent book, The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo writes about his research while conducting the Stanford Prisoner Experiment (1971) . His research and analysis with the Stanford Prisoner Experiment (SPE) describes the almost immediate effects of imprisonment on psychologically healthy humans. The effects were not limited to the prisoners. Using the same random sampling to select psychologically healthy young adult males as guards, Zimbardo created an experimental prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department building. Before entering the experiment, most of the participants thought that the few days of the experiment would be a fun time with role playing. Within a few hours, the guards and prisoners - who were seemingly indistinguishable from each other prior to the experiment, fell into roles that reflected the grim settings of institutional prisons. Many of the guards became abusive, and most of the prisoners became passive, emotionally distraught, and within a day, had lost perspective that they were actually in an experiment. Zimbardo's analysis of this group of young men in the experiment showed how powerfully the system of the "prison" effected each player. The gravitational pull was so strong that each individual inhabited their respective roles as passive prisoners and abusive guards without much resistance. With regard to human beings, it seems that the three conditions that set up the strongest coherence in this system were the roles of captor and prisoner within the structural confines of physical setting (third condition) . In a prison, these roles are black and white. Out in the (mostly) autonomous world, these roles are played out with more shades of grey. I can think of an abusive boss and employee falling into this system as one example. My father recently had hip replacement surgery, and his resulting rehabilitation reminded me of another example. After his surgery and two recovery days in the hospital, a decision was made by the weekend staff to send him to a nursing home (euphemism: rehab facility) for five days to get back his strength. Before the surgery he was told he would go home after his hospital stay. Because the weekend staff did not include his surgeon, other people at the hospital without knowledge of my father's specific condition changed his itinerary. They were covering their behinds for insurance purposes, in case he fell at home and re-injured himself. My father had little choice in this: he was threatened with voided insurance if he resisted the staff's opinion. I called him after his first night at the rehab facility to see how he was doing. His behavior reminded me of the experiment described by Zimbardo. He told me that he felt like he had no rights, didn't know if he would ever get out of there, and that they were going to slowly kill him with the terrible food (no humor). This was coming from someone who was renowned for his sense of control and well being. I asked how they were treating him, and he told me everyone was very nice to him. He also told me that nobody was telling him anything about his condition or when he would be able to leave. He felt like a prisoner. The "guards" were respectful and nice. What was missing was his autonomous ability to come and go, and a chance to interact with someone who could listen to his complaints and tell him what exactly his situation was. He quickly deteriorated emotionally. Ultimately, my father was able to get his own food, delivered by my mom, and learned after 5 days that he could leave. Once he got home, his emotional state returned to normal, and is recovering well. Seeing my emotionally sturdy dad succumb to such a system, (one where people were trying to help him!) provided me with some insight into some conditions that prevail on this captor/prisoner system. Human beings quickly deteriorate if they feel they have no autonomy. This situation further deteriorates if they feel that their words fall on deaf ears. For the captors (or orderlies/bosses etc.): The temptation to treat them/supervise them/take care of them without sensitivity to their needs leads to further alienation and downward spiral of the system. [...]
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks 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.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks 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
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks 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.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks 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.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Random House Trade Paperbacks Product Description
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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