The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil [Paperback]

 

 

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In "Star Wars", the Jedi knight, Anakin Skywalker, gets turned to the dark side and becomes the notorious Darth Vader. The story is told in such a way that the subtle changes leading to his conversion are quite believable. We would like to think that in real life converting someone to an evil cause would be much more difficult, but in fact it turns out to be even easier than the way it happened in the movie.

In this book Philip Zimbardo the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) documents how easy it is to make good people do bad things. The first part of the book is a detailed account of his "prison" experiment in which students selected as being of average disposition were assigned roles as prisoners and guards in a mock prison, and how quickly they assumed the roles they were given to play. It soon got to a point where the guard behavior became excessively cruel, some of the prisoners were on the verge of mental breakdown, and the experiment had to be aborted. Even Zimbardo himself became immersed in his role as superintendent and forgot his objectivity as the experimenter.

Although I was previously aware of the SPE, I did not know that it had been in part paid for by the U.S. military through the Office of Naval Research. Strangely the author does not see anything that might be wrong with this even though the results were a pretty clear lesson in how to create stress in prisoners.

He goes on to describe other work such as Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments in which people would obey an authority figure by shocking "learners", actually actors pretending to be shocked, to the point of death. In another experiment women would even shock a puppy to the point of severe injury or death to "help" them learn. He makes it clear that systemic and institutional factors are a huge determinant of how each of us will behave in any given situation and our disposition or character can easily be manipulated. He even gives ten lessons in "Creating Evil Traps for Good People".

As Walter Bagehot, an editor of The Economist Newspaper observed many years ago: the opinion of others is "a permeating influence and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's' words, to follow other men's habits."

Zimbardo was hired as an expert witness for the defense of one the participants in the abuses and torture at Abu Gharib prison in Iraq to show why it was caused by the function of systemic and institutional factors and not "bad apples". He tells the history leading up to events at Abu Gharib and makes the case that it was the higher ups that created the climate that allowed the abuse to take place. The defendant was still found guilty.

In the last part of the book he tries to put on a happy face, by telling us how to resist situational influences and then talks about what makes people take heroic action. One thing that detracts from his ideas of heroism however, is his inclusion of his wife as a heroic figure just because she got upset when she witnessed the effects his experiment was having. She certainly was not exposed to any of the sacrifice or risk factors he claims are needed to define heroic action.

At the end I found myself thinking that his own institutional situation has to be a major factor in determining the spin he puts on his ideas, and that none of us are exempt from this. This is especially true of our leaders. George Bush has the ultimate excuse for his behavior as God wanted him to be President.

In summary the book is very interesting and gives us all more excuses for our bad behavior. As Flip Wilson's character Geraldine used to say "the devil made me do it".

Zimbardo is the creator of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of young college students were randomly split into guards and prisoners in a mock prison for two weeks to see how their roles, the context, and the situation would affect their behavior. Thanks to the intervention of an outsider (Zimbardo himself was too sucked in by the situation to notice), the experiment was stopped short after less than a week as the two groups went wildly out of control. Prisoners were rioting, having nervous breakdowns, and losing all hope while guards became sadistic and authoritarian. Zimbardo quite aptly compares it to the situation at Abu Graib. Context completely took over these normal young adults who had been screened to be just that- healthy, normal young adults.

Most of the book is about the experiment, describing it in great depth and detail. Then there's several chapters on other social science research (including Milgram's dramatic studies of authority), two LONG chapters on Abu Graib (not very interesting to this non-American), and one final chapter on heroes. In particular, this book is lacking (in my opinion) more data and commentary on the latter topic of heroes, as well as MUCH more commentary from the participants of the prison experiment after it's all over. That's what really fascinates me- when normal people turn evil, how do they react to that fact later when they return to normal? How do they cope mentally with the knowledge that they just turned evil?

Because that's really one of two main themes of this book. That is, most evil is done by normal people, just as is most heroics are done by normal people. Because of theme two: the incredible power of social contexts and situations. People have "free will", but it can be very strongly influenced by the influence of social factors. Zimbardo does a very good job explaining the second theme, but I felt he fell a little short explaining the first (and perhaps more important?) theme. Particularly since he thinks it's vital for humanity's survival that we appreciate how vulnerable we all are to social influence, and how the ultimate path to good lies in both using that social influence for positive ends and resisting that social influence when it is for immoral ends.

That's a very powerful and sobering thought that is generally well explored in this book, making it certainly worth reading. It is generally well written, aimed at a broad audience, and although it sometimes seem a little self-aggrandizing, it's generally quite factual. Recommended.

The product arrived in excellent condition. The book was almost new, just missing the dust jacket.

The way the author presented the material was anecdotal, with insightful observations about the subjects. But of course, he is a psych prof at Stanford.

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