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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2060 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-22
• Released on: 2008-01-22
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Psychologist Zimbardo masterminded the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates found themselves enacting sadistic abuse or abject submissiveness. In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about "the banality of heroism," with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.) The author, who was an expert defense witness at the court-martial of an Abu Ghraib guard, argues against focusing on the dispositions of perpetrators of abuse; he insists that we blame the situation and the "system" that constructed it, and mounts an extended indictment of the architects of the Abu Ghraib system, including President Bush. Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world's ills. 23 photos. (Apr. 3)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Social psychologist Zimbardo is best known as the father of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, which used a simulated prison populated with student volunteers to illustrate the extent to which identity is situated within a social setting; student volunteers randomly chosen to play guards became cruel and authoritarian, while those playing inmates became rebellious and depressed. With this book, Zimbardo couples a thorough narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment with an analysis of the social dynamics of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that the "experimental dehumanization" of the former is instructive in understanding the abusive conduct of guards at the latter. This comparison, which is the book's core insight, is embedded in a sprawling discussion about situational influences that cobbles together a discussion of the psychology of evil, a strong criticism of the Bush administration, and a chapter celebrating heroism and calling for greater social bravery. This account's Abu Ghraib focus will generate demand. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Philip Zimbardo is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and has also taught at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University. He is the co-author of Psychology and Life and author of Shyness, which together have sold more than 2.5 million copies. Zimbardo has been president of the American Psychological Association and is now director of the Stanford Center on Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism. He also narrated the award-winning PBS series Discovering Psychology, which he helped create. In 2004, he acted as an expert witness in the court-martial hearings of one of the American army reservists accused of criminal behavior in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His informative website, www.prisonexperiment.org is visited by millions every year. Visit the author’s personal website at www.zimbardo.com.


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

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. [...]

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.

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