The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil Author: Philip Zimbardo | Language: English | ISBN:
B000OVLKFO | Format: PDF
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil 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.- File Size: 1809 KB
- Print Length: 576 pages
- Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (March 27, 2007)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000OVLKFO
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,312 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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- #43
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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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