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Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Random House
April 2007
On Sale: March 27, 2007
576 pages
ISBN: 1400064112
EAN: 9781400064113
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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 barrelâ€â€“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.
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