The Lucifer Effect
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.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
13mentions
11people
2007–2024years
62% recommend31% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Lucifer Effect is a great book. It's thesis is "what makes good people do bad things". I recommend it to anyone considering doing bad things, or to anyone who knows good people who do bad things.
- To your point about a few bad cops, the "bad apples" theory is just a way for institutional leaders to throw blame away from their own leadership, by isolating the blame to a few low-level individuals. We have to get away from the "bad apples" theory and start thinking about "bad barrels" that spoil the apples within.
We know how a riot can be a bad barrel that leads the people involved to do bad things. But a riot is not a day-to-day occurrence with its own persistent culture.
On the other hand, a police department does have a persistent culture, and we don't exactly understand how or why some police departments engender more brutality than others.
"The Lucifer Effect" is a very interesting book on the institutional dynamics that lead otherwise normal people to do horrific things. It is written by Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford Prison Experiment fame. He is a proponent of the "bad barrel" theory.
- One of my favorite books is "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo, who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment and was called in as an expert witness in a 2004 court martial on Abu Ghraib. By his logic, it's not hard to argue that higher-ups share complicity for some of the abuses that occur, for the simple fact that they establish and administer a social and procedural environment that condones, permits, or overlooks prisoner abuse instances as well as the behavior that leads up to them.
- The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo is a satisfactory primer.
https://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-Peo...
- I know of no better or more accessible review of the psychology of evil than "The Lucifer effect" (2007) by Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist who, in spite of a long and illustrious career, probably is still best known for the infamous Stanford prison study. The companion website to the book is still up on http://www.lucifereffect.com/
Zimbardo has stated that he is still pained at the memories of the Stanford prison study, which had to be aborted prematurely because the vile characteristics it exposed in normal, healthy participants was going out of control. He reluctantly revisited the study in detail because he saw striking parallels to the torture and humiliation in the Abu Ghraib prison under US occupation. While he's at it he also reviews much other research into the psychology of authoritarianism, obedience, dehumanization and other facets of social psychology that add up to what may very reasonably be called Evil.
I might add that organizations like the CIA are well aware of these principles, and appears to have been working on ways of weaponizing them. It is my opinion that they are using them to corrupt individuals and whole social environments when that suits their ends. In fact, in spite of "The Lucifer Effect" being a fascinating read from beginning to end, one of the parts I found most interesting was the evidence indicating that US intelligence actively created the psychological conditions for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Highly recommended reading, and very relevant for much of the potential consequences of mass surveillance.
- There are valid criticisms of the SPE, but this isn't one of them. Zimbardo, in his work on heroism, later referenced exactly how he himself came to recognize the mistake: his fiancee came in, took one look, and was terrified by what she observed.
I don't know how your author managed to read The Lucifer Effect and miss that. The last page he quotes from is page 194. The book is a good 400 pages long. The "unreflective" echo that Zimbardo gives ends a chapter offering evidence.
He spends the next two chapters answering it.
He also wrote http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/the_banality_of... which Barker apparently either found unworthy of mention or never read.
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