The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Author: Philip Zimbardo | Language: English | ISBN:
0812974441 | Format: PDF
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Description
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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 DriscollCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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- Paperback: 576 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (January 22, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812974441
- ISBN-13: 978-0812974447
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment from the early 70's used college students for a study, making half of them prisoners and the other half guards. With instructions meant to polarize, the worst in human nature quickly came out, and the experiment had to be discontinued prematurely. Unlike other important studies, this one could not be duplicated because of ethical concerns, but many similar studies have been done - most of them validating Zimbardo's result: that with few exceptions, the best of us can be coerced to perform evil acts under the right social circumstances. A book about Zimbardo's findings is long overdue. The incident at Abu Ghraib and his participation in the trial sparked his enthusiasm to share this story with us.
Chapter I - According to the story in the Bible, Lucifer, God's favorite angel, challenged God's authority - thus began the transformation of Lucifer into Satan. Zimbardo finds here an analogy to the situation in all wars, where men routinely justify being inhumane to other men, despite clear direction otherwise from the Geneva Convention.
Chapters II - IX - Zimbardo had 24-hour audio and video surveillance of the prison and kept meticulous written notes. He presents verbatim transcripts of tense conversation and photographs. A variety of situations from world history are presented showing disturbing descriptions of torture, rape, and general abuse of a captured, helpless enemy. He then draws analogies between real history and the Stanford prison experiment.
Chapters X - XI - Elaboration on the importance, ethical considerations, and notoriety of the Stanford prison experiment. If you Google "experiment," the first website listed is this one, out of a potential 300 million.
The book started off strong, the opening chapter to the book gave a very dark and dismal look into the nature of humans all over the world, from Nazis, to Rwanda, to Prisoners of War in general, humans have found very disturbing and twisted ways of punishing and dominating over others. The beginning of the book was so bleak and upsetting that I ended up putting the book aside and crying over the lack of humanity of my fellow human beings. I wanted to continue on because the author stated that to guard oneself against this tide of darkness, one must first see the depths of the despair and learn how people, who are very much like me and you, came to place.
The next the author takes us to his Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). I multiple problems with this study. First off, the guards had no training what so ever to be guards, in fact, they were told that they needed to dehumanize and deindividuate the prisoners to bring on a sense of hopelessness and despair and that they could have complete and total control over everything the prisoners experienced. Well, with orienting the guards in that manner it is no wonder how things went the way they did. Not to mention that if any of the guards showed humanity they were taken aside and told to do a better job by showing more authority and reigning in any type of compassion for the prisoners. There are many other things about the experiment that were upsetting, from the fact that prisoners felt they could not leave and it seemed they couldn't, not even when they said they wished to leave because it wasn't given as a direct command only a wanting, to the mock-parole hearings that further confused and shamed the prisoners, to the complete lack of oversight, expect reminders to dehumanize the prisoners and not to physically abuse them.
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