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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil By Philip Zimbardo ( Random House Trade Paperbacks )
Release Date: 2008-01-22
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List Price: $18.00
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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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 Fascinating ( msbungle )
If you ever wanted to know why people can stand idly by while someone commits a crime, commits an act of cruely against a child or animal, or motivates the populace into mass homicide, then this book is for you.
It covers the spectrum from every day occurances and seemingly innocent acts of "minding my own business" to how this can be used as an excuse for ignoring some of the world's injustices. A big part of this is the abu graib instances, but you could probably as easily apply it to Nazi Germany or Jonestown.
His idea of what a "hero" truly is in our society, someone who stands up against what they are told and does what they believe is right, is amazing.
If, like me, you like to delve into how your fellow humans think and what motivates them to do the things they do, then this book is for you.
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The Yahweh effect
As noted on the jacket, "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."
Prof. Zimbardo's lab subjects were American college students--your ordinary, beer-drinking, fun-loving, fornicating liberal humanists. What possessed them to enter into Dr. Zimbardo's laboratory and suddenly start acting like evangelical Christians? These were not bad kids! But under the direction of an authoritative patriarchal figure, many of the kids quickly consented to the torture of those subjects who believed the wrong way, or who could not remember the right answer.
My one beef with this book is that Prof. Zimbardo has taken my name in vain: "The Lucifer Effect." Seriously: Zimbardo's title annoys the hell out of me. When have I ever taken pleasure in the suffering, or starvation, or military defeat, or disease, or damnation, of a culture different from my own? If I EVER behave myself like an evangelical Christian, especially an American one, bind me in adamantine chains and lock me up in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. I've gotten some bad press over the years, but I'm basically a good guy, and I am the same yesterday, today, and forever.
God, on the other hand, is...
No, the less said about God the better. If I tell you the truth, He will hurt me, and for a very long time. But you can look it up: it's in the Bible.
When dictating the Old and New Testaments, the holy Ghost often sounds embarrassed that the Father, when angry, behaves so badly - which would elevate my opinion of the Ghost except that the Bible always takes the line that Yahveh is an holy and inscrutable Father who can do as He pleases without asking children like you or me for their moral approval. The Old Testament is a bloody book, recording the massacre of more than one million civilians whom the Lord killed on a whim, or who were killed at His command during impulsive fits of divine wrath - and countless thousands more whom your heavenly Father slew in plagues, storms, earthquakes, and famine, most often for an honest mistake made by someone in their government, as with King David and his census or, worse, when some tinpot Bronze Age king paid his respects to the wrong divinity.
Although the name Yahveh, means "Jealous," the Lord has said He dislikes being made jealous or angry (Exod. 34:14). It does not thrill Him to hurt people. And He can still be incredibly patient, for days on end. In fact, the Lord never used to be irascible at all, prior to Creation. But there is just something about Earth people (Jewish people in particular) that sets Him off. And when He feels jealous, which is most of the time, your heavenly Father freely admits, in the Scriptures, to having performed "evil" deeds (in Hebrew, ra, applied dozens of times to God's behavior; and elsewhere in Scripture, to arson, cannibalism, fratricide, incest, infanticide, matricide, patricide, sister-rape, slander, theft, treachery, adultery, homosexuality, murder, and tree-worship. God's "evil" has lately been euphemised, in the New Age New International Version, in order to sell more Bibles, under the less unpleasant word, "trouble"; thereby to conform with modern, extrabiblical English; as, say, in the phrase, "Almighty God in the 1930s and early 40s permitted German Jews to suffer ra (a little bit of trouble).
The Lord uses His "evil" (ra) to keep all men, but especially the Jews, on their toes: "Thus says Yahveh, the God of Israel: "Look to it! I shall bring such evil ... that whosoever hears of it, both his ears shall tingle!" (2 Kings 21:12, KJV). If your own ears tingled when you first learned about what the Christian Serbs did to the Muslims in Croatia, or what the Lutherans did to the Jews in Hitler's Germany, or what David did to the Ammonites in Palestine; or if you felt even the slightest little tingle when you heard about what the Americans did to Iraqi Muslims at Abu Ghraib; then you may thank the Lord for the sensation, because He played a role in each one of those capers.
Here is how the Lord justifies His bad behavior: if I hurt My own creatures, that does not make Me a "bad" person, but only "mischievous." As it is written: "He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person" (Proverbs 24:8, KJV).
I'm not making any of this up. Sometimes I wish people WOULD read the Word of God.
--L
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good
its a good book to read especially if your into psychology it is also a good ethics review(i used it in that class).if ur a casual reader it still a good buy.
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 Excellent
Everyone has their biases, but the thing that distinguishes a real intellectual from a phony is recognizing the bias and moving on. This thought struck me as I read social psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo's 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect. I received the book gratis, from the publisher, because I will be interviewing Zimbardo at a later date, and immediately I thought of the book The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, a man I'd interviewed a few years ago. That earlier book, while a good read, was in no way a book that used hard science, nor the scientific method, to approach the subject of humans and evil. Bloom's book was, in many ways, a modern echo of the Thomas Hobbesian view of mankind as an evil agent just waiting to bust loose, even if leavened by claims that `evil,' or the propensity toward violence, is a natural outcome of evolutionary selection. Zimbardo resists both supernaturalism and philosophic psychobabble when he claims that evil is merely a system of intentional harm, abuse, and dehumanization of innocents, whether by direct or indirect means.
Zimbardo's book, by contrast, is more grounded in experimentation, documentation, and less malleable and subjective than Bloom's book; despite Zimbardo's critics often railing against his methods as `unscientific.' Yet, perhaps because of Zimbardo's book's title's similarity with Bloom's, I was preparing for another metaphysical trip into pop culture's tangential nod with science. I was, admittedly biased to be skeptical about the book, but, as I am a good critic, and had let past biases toward such works of art, as It's A Wonderful Life, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and The Curse Of The Cat People, rob me of their insight for too long, I dashed all expectations and was rewarded early on, starting with Zimbardo's excellent Preface to the book, wherein he documents personal and professional things which led up to the book's release, over three decades in the making.... The book also delves into cultural ritualism, such as the usage of masks and military uniforms to deindividuate persons into parts of a `machine' to get them to commit acts of violence. It's an ancient and effective technique, of course, and Zimbardo does a far better job of explaining the whys and wherefores of such things than did a charlatan like Joseph Campbell. The book has many great qualities, although it clearly is not for all readers. People with a video game mindset will get bored the first time Zimbardo digresses for a page or two to explain something, and many others will likely just skim through the long sections on the SPE and Abu Ghraib. However, for those wanting to get a fundamental understanding into the nature of why men do bad things, The Lucifer Effect, is a good start, and far easier to sift through than typical psychological texts or those which become more well known for the times they were written in than anything immanent (think of any book by Magnus Hirschfeld). In short, read this book with an open mind, and you will likely have a different opinion on many of the things you take for granted when you flip on the tv, watch the latest daily horror from around the world or around the corner. And for those you don't, this book may explain why. Having one's cake, yet eating it too, need not always be a desideratum, need it?
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"Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent " -George Steiner
The beginning of the book wasn't very encouraging, as Zimbardo describes in graphic details the "rape of Rwanda" in 1994, when the Tutsis were slaughtered by their former neighbors, the Hutus. Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a former social worker, who was supposed to be the only hope left for the Tutsi village of Butare, had promised food and shelter sent by the Red Cross to the people of the village. Instead, Pauline arranged for Hutu thugs to rape and kill the Tutsis. Pauline ordered the rape of the women before having most Tutsis killed in a massacre that was one of the most barbaric incidents in history. Zimbardo provided a combination of history and social psychology to explain how Pauline turned into a special kind of a murderer and even provides a comment by Nicole Bergevin; Pauline's lawyer which summarizes the fact that all humans are SUSCEPTIBLE to evil under certain circumstances.
I can't help but wondering, how can a person like Pauline who intentionally tricked the Tutsis and planned one of the most savage, torturous and sadistic attacks in history be used as an example of how good people can turn evil under situational pressure? EITHER WORDS HAVE MEANINGS, OR NOT. At this point I had to recheck if Zimbardo was an attorney not a psychologist (to be able to find many unreasonable possibilities for the obvious), but I was wrong, he's for sure not an attorney. I still think, with all due respect though, that Zimbardo can make a great criminal defense attorney.
Zimbardo uses other examples of war where morality is disengaged and barbaric behavior is directed against any body considered to be the enemy, because of the power of situational forces over individual behavior. At this point, I wanted to stop reading but Zimbardo promises to reverse the question at the end of his research, which is asking if we are capable of becoming heroes after analyzing why we can become capable of evil.
I had nearly fixed in my mind my interpretation of this book; I believe that any body can turn into a killer when it comes to protecting loved ones (i.e. in self defense), but the idea that we can become evil just because others are, is beyond me. Even as kids, some kids will set the limits and refuse to gang up with bullies against the weak easy target. Even in war and crisis, people with basic concepts of morality will have mercy on the enemies when meeting as two humans on the battlefield (if that even exist any more), or when it comes to killing civilians.
I believe that good is the rule and evil is the exception, so with the slight hope promised by the author of reversing the question, I was willing to take the risk of spending more time on this book.
Doubtful, but willing to explore, I started reading about Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment:
An experiment Zimbardo conducted in 1971 on some college students, who were asked to play the roles of guards and prisoners
The detailed behavioral analysis of the teams of volunteers, who very quickly turn into abused and abusers, such that the experiment had to be interrupted within a week, was unnecessarily long, but I was still curious.
Personally, the experiment does not sound scientific to me, especially when it doesn't provide any emotional or psychological history of the participants. Also, the idea of a professional, watching and hearing the verbal and semi-sexual abuse that the prisoners experienced is a skate across very thin ethical ice.
At one point in the book, Zimbardo used the results of the Stanford prison experiment, when he was called as an expert witness in the trial of Sergeant Frederick, one of the defendants in "Abu Ghraib" trial. Also, later in the book, Zimbardo's analysis was compared to many documented historical incidents of prison cruelty and other cruel acts committed during wars.
My conclusion is that I'm happy I took the time to listen to the other point of view.
I admire the author for his 30 years of persistence and devotion to the study of a concept in which he has faith. Likewise, I respect his courage in blaming the Bush administration as accomplices for the torture interrogation in Iraq. Also, Zimbardo's brutally honest telling of the Abou Ghraib trial's details supports my belief about the insidious corruption in the legal system
Despite my understanding of the "us versus them" concept, there is no detail in the book of a study that shows examples of a previous good history of these soldiers/people "going bad". ". The Stanford prison experiment itself focused on a number of volunteers with no analysis of their characters. Here I can't help but asking a simple question that also takes us back to Pauline Nyiramasuhuko and the rape of Rwanda: what if these people are actually evil, who just like sadistic individuals simply don't feel the pain of others if it's separated from their own body? Where is the proof that they were good people previous to the new situation???. I don't have any facts to support my theory here, but just like kids who are not joining bullies hurting other kids, I can see other soldiers in Abou Ghraib saying no to the other "bad" soldiers, and others dying on the battle field trying to save some civilian enemy. It's not a result of a physiological research, but a simple romantic hope for goodness in people.
Aside from all my objections, Zimbardo, who fulfilled his promise of reversing the question and provided some instructions to resist the power of social/political pressure and to not join the "herd", did a reasonably good job.
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Addiction
