The Lucifer Effect, published in 2007 by Philip Zimbardo, a professor of psychology at Stanford University who has also taught at Yale, is an informative, detailed read on the human propensity for what can be labeled “good” and “evil.” The Lucifer Effect begins with Zimbardo talking about a variety of humanity’s past atrocities, then moves on to discuss the Stanford Prison Experiment, before describing the human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib, and finally gives a call to action for the audience to heed.
To begin, the title of the book was named after Lucifer, the main antagonist in the divine drama in Christianity, who is infamous for turning from God’s favorite angel into the devil. While Zimbardo mainly focuses on how good people turn evil, he also discusses the contrary, as noted in the beginning. Looking back at his life in the Bronx, he could see The Lucifer Effect happening to those he knew around him, as some of his friends whom he viewed as being good actually ended up in bad places. For instance, an extreme example is with his friend Donny, who was severely abused by his father - whenever he committed or was suspected of any wrongdoing, his father would strip him naked and force him to kneel on rice kernels in the bathtub. Eventually, this caused him so much damage that he ended up in prison as a teenager. But on a more mundane level, Zimbardo describes how “As part of the gang initiation process we all had to steal, fight against another kid, do some daring deeds, and intimidate girls and Jewish kids going to synagogue” (xi). Zimbardo then moves on to describe humanity’s past actions, but not before discussing the “root” of evil. Zimbardo states that many view evil as being inherent within a person, while others view nurture as being more important than nature. This can be broken down into three types - dispositional, situational, and systemic. In dispositional evil, the person can be viewed as being evil by chance alone - they were born with a chemical imbalance that causes them to negatively affect others. When it comes to situational evil, the situation they find themselves in is the main cause of their wrongdoing. And when it comes to systemic wrongdoing, the system the person finds themselves in (ex. a totalitarian government or corrupt educational system) is what causes them to do what they do.
Zimbardo then provides a narrative of humanity’s wrongdoings, beginning with the Inquisition. The Inquisition, founded to destroy heresy, followed the Malleus Maleficarum, translated as “The Witch’s Hammer.” This terrible text was required reading for judges of the Inquisition, and it stated that an all-wise, all-powerful God allows evil to test people, and those who succeed will go to Heaven, and those who fail will go to Hell (why an all-good God will torture people forever is beyond my understanding, especially considering that he can hypothetically make everything pure and beautiful if he is all-powerful). Anyways, the judges of the Inquisition proceeded to torture those who were suspected to be witches - the Inquisition’s judges viewed witches as being dispositionally evil - and to execute those whom they judged as guilty. As Zimbardo describes, “Although I have made light of what amounted to a carefully designed system of mass terror, torture, and extermination of untold thousands of people, this kind of simplistic reduction of the complex issues regarding evil fueled the fires of the Inquisition. Making ‘witches’ the despised dispositional category provided a ready solution to the problem of societal evil by simply destroying as many agents of evil as could be identified, tortured, and boiled in oil or burned at the stake” (9). Zimbardo then discusses the human propensity to turn fellow neighbors and even friends into “the enemy,” and that completely imaginary differences are created by outside forces. This is seen especially well in the Rape of Rwanda, in which 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered by their neighbors, the Hutu. A Hutu, after murdering a neighbor whom he was friends with, stated “‘The worst thing about the massacre was killing my neighbor; we used to drink together, his cattle would graze on my land. He was like a relative’” (13). In another instance, a Hutu mother killed children next door by beating them to death, who were terrified and shocked because they had known her their entire lives. She justified her atrocity by stating that she was “doing ‘a favor’ to those children, who would have become helpless orphans given that their parents had already been murdered” (13). Zimbardo then describes the Rape of Nanking in China, and he states that Japanese soldiers “butchered between 260,000 and 350,000 Chinese civilians in just a few bloody months of 1937,” but not before raping 20,000 to 80,000 women, and “went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them to walls alive” (17). Zimbardo then accurately assesses that “War engenders cruelty and barbaric behavior against anyone considered the Enemy, as the dehumanized, demonic Other” (17). Zimbardo then talks about human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison, in which previously upright soldiers had physically beaten and humiliated prisoners on a whim - “The images are of punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their feet; forcibly arranging naked, hooded prisoners in piles and pyramids; forcing naked prisoners to wear women’s underwear over their heads” (19).
Zimbardo, after giving instances of real evil, talks about the Stanford Prison Experiment, which he helped head. The volunteers for the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) were young men who were screened to make sure they were mentally fit for the experiment, and were assigned to be “guard” or “prisoner” on a basis completely determined by luck. The purpose of the experiment was to see the relationship between guards and prisoners in a controlled setting, and to make the real-life one better as a result. The experiment was planned to take two weeks, beginning on a Sunday, but it only operated for six days, as soon after the experiment began, prisoners and guards were completely immersed in the roleplay, and forgot their real identities. The prisoners actually believed they were prisoners, as some of them barricaded themselves in their rooms and refused to come out, and some suffered psychological disturbances. For instance, Prisoner 819, whose actual name was Stewart, broke down on Wednesday, as when Zimbardo (who role-played the superintendent of the prison), saw him, he was “a quivering mass, hysterical,” as he wanted to show the guards his resistance by messing up his cell, which led to the rest of the prisoners becoming resentful towards him (107). Zimbardo succeeded in breaking through Stewart’s illusion that he was a prisoner by telling him “‘Listen carefully to me, now, you’re not 819. You are Stewart, and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those guys in there are just students, like you. So it’s time to go home, Stewart. Come with me now. Let’s go’” (107). In Chapter 7, “The Power to Parole,” the prisoners in the experiment attempted to get released early, completely forgetting that they were in an experiment, and not a real prison. Even the priest who was called to give them advice didn't take into account that this was an experiment, and instead of giving them spiritual and moral advice, proceeded to give them legal ones. Zimbardo remarks that “Why did none of them say, ‘Since I do not want your money, I am free to quit this experiment and demand to be released now.’ We would have had to obey their request … Yet none did. Not one prisoner later told us that he had even considered that he could quit the experiment because virtually all of them had stopped thinking of their experience as just an experiment” (141).
The guards, as stated before, also gave in to their roles and forgot who they actually were, as seen in their frequent inhumane behavior towards the prisoners. The guards would punish prisoner misbehavior by making them do extensive physical exercise, by telling the other prisoners to humiliate them, and by forcing them to do degrading tasks. For instance, an especially cruel guard, nicknamed “John Wayne,” along with a guard named Burdan, told the prisoners that: “‘You three are going to be female camels. Get over here and bend over touching your hands to the floor.’ (When they do, their naked butts are exposed since they are wearing no underwear beneath their smock-dresses.) … ‘Now you two, you’re male camels. Stand behind the female camels and hump them’” (172). The prisoners obeyed the guards, and “Although their bodies never touch, the helpless prisoners are simulating sodomy by making thrusting motions of humping” (172). Zimbardo remarks that it is disturbing how normal young men (some of them were attending Stanford) could resort to this kind of behavior in just five days in an experiment, and Zimbardo admits that he was disappointed in himself, as he was not “among that noble class” of the select few who “were able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance while maintaining some semblance of morality and decency” (173).
On Friday, six days after the experiment, Zimbardo, pressured by his future wife who learned of the experiment, terminated the SPE, and debriefed all of the participants. The guard who was John Wayne, Hellmann, expressed remorse for his actions (his eyes got teary while he was talking), and he said that he was running a “little experiment” in which he could test the limits of what he could say and do, and that he was surprised that people would obey him without questioning - “‘They’d do push-ups without question, they’d sit in the Hole, they’d abuse each other … they’re abusing each other because I requested them to and no one questioned my authority at all’” (194). Zimbardo, thinking about the SPE, said that while his experiment wasn’t, of course, a real prison, it did imitate many real-life dynamics, as the power of the guards could cause them to act sadistically (especially if the individuals have repressed their anger for long periods of time prior to the experiment) while prisoners could become pathological, forgetting that they aren’t prisoners and that even if they were, they severely outnumber the guards. Instead of cooperating and going on a hunger strike, the participants in the SPE turned against the lone protestor, which caused the entire event to become a failure. Zimbardo then describes that in the SPE roles became real, as people became what they were assigned by chance. He connects this to the Nazi doctors in the Holocaust, whose roles, to the objective eye, have changed drastically - they have transitioned from healers into murderers. Zimbardo describes that the Nazi doctors were indeed human and rational, and that they were persuaded “by means of a group consensus that their behavior was necessary for the common good,” as seen in the following dialogue which would commonly occur between a new doctor and a seasoned one: “‘How can these things be done here?’ … What is better for him [the prisoner] - whether he croaks [verreckt] in shit or goes to heaven in [a cloud of] gas? And that settled the whole matter for the initiates … Mass killing was the unyielding fact of life to which everyone was expected to adapt” (215). Zimbardo then discusses the danger of language, especially euphemisms, as language that sounds professional and decent could make it easier for people to follow through with inhumane actions. For instance, the Holocaust was termed “The Final Solution” to convince people that it was needed to improve the world, and it made the mass murder seem excusable. Regardless, many of the doctors who participated found it difficult to make excuses, so they would commonly practice the principle of “doubling,” in which they have two roles - the one which they follow when they aren’t working and the one they adopt when they are choosing who gets to live and who is sent to the gas chamber.
Zimbardo then talks about the Milgram electric-shock experiments, which i’m not going to get into here (if you are curious, you can look at my summary for Milgram’s book). Zimbardo then moves on to discuss psychological mechanisms which explain wanton behavior. There is dehumanization, in which a person is stripped of their humanity, and deindividuation, in which people lose themselves to the group they are belonging to, which makes it easier for them to commit heinous actions. This, Zimbardo describes, is seen very well in the fantastic Lord of the Flies, in which Jack, upon painting his face, is ecstatic with the freedom he has acquired, as he no longer resembles his previous self. The principle of deindividuation is a dangerous one, as Seneca, a Roman Stoic, said that few things are more corrupting than the power of a crowd, especially the mob in the Colosseum, as even virtuous men commonly lose themselves in the mass of people, calling for blood to be spilled by those fighting in the Colosseum for the crowd’s amusement. This is also seen with how schoolchildren, if they are wearing costumes which hide their identity, are more likely to be aggressive when it comes to taking candy on Halloween. When children are in anonymous groups, the chance of them being aggressive is 57%, and while they are anonymous and alone, that drops to 21%, clearly illustrating that peer pressure is also vital to their behavior. Zimbardo then ironically describes “cultural wisdom,” which gives people advice on how to make soldiers kill abroad but not at home. Zimbardo clearly demonstrates that soldiers who put on war paint and hide their identities are much more likely to commit atrocities than those who are clearly identifiable - “90 percent of the time when victims of battle were killed, tortured, or mutilated, it was by warriors who had first changed their appearance and deindividuated themselves. Cultural wisdom dictates that a key ingredient in transforming ordinarily nonaggressive young men into warriors who can kill on command is first to change their external appearance” (304). Zimbardo then says that understanding these factors isn’t equivalent to excusing it, as these things need to be understood to prevent the likelihood of them occurring in the future. Zimbardo soon talks about the evil of inaction, in which people turn a blind eye to evil which could be done by their friends, family, or professional group. This can be seen with police and brutality, Catholic priests ignoring their contemporaries who molest children, and students who ignore the prolific cheating of their peers. Zimbardo then illustrates that those who are supposed to do good commonly don’t do it when they’re in a hurry, while the opposite is true when they have a lot of time - 90% of seminary students, upon seeing a person who possibly needed their help while they themselves were hurrying to give a speech on kindness, “passed up the immediately compelling chance to be a Good Samaritan because they were in a hurry to give a sermon about it” (317).
Zimbardo eventually comes to talk about Abu Ghraib, a prison in the Middle East, and the way the guards mistreated the prisoners who were present. This was very similar to the SPE, but it was perhaps more disturbing, as otherwise normal American adult soldiers were the ones committing the wrongdoings. The guards would commonly force the prisoners to simulate copulation, force them to strip their clothing before creating a human pyramid atop each other, attach leashes to their necks and drag them around, force them into uncomfortable stationary positions, threaten their safety with attack dogs, and sit on them. Zimbardo expresses his disappointment that people have viewed this phenomenon as being the work of only a few bad apples, as the entire system encourages this kind of behavior. Zimbardo clearly illustrates that Abu Ghraib is a terrible place to be in, as mortar attacks happen, creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Similar places to Abu Ghraib include “Eighty of Acres of Hell,” otherwise known as Camp Douglas, in which thousands of Confederate soldiers died of mistreatment, starvation, disease, and torture during the American Civil War, which isn’t surprising, especially considering that many of those in the Union viewed them as “‘traitors’” (335). Like Abu Ghraib, the guards were afraid of prisoner uprisings, as in Camp Douglas there was only a small battalion of guards who “supervised as many as five thousand prisoners” (335). Zimbardo, after discussing the general situation of Abu Ghraib, focuses on one individual, “Chip” Frederick. One of the guards in the prison, “Chip” Frederick was put on trial for the degradations which he enforced on the prisoners, and when Zimbardo looked at his profile, he found a completely normal person - he had parents who supported and cared for him, he regularly attends church, he views himself as a decent person, attended a community college and went to Allegheny College in Maryland but failed to finish his degree, was an average-C student, enjoyed playing basketball, baseball, football, and soccer in high school, enjoyed hunting and fishing, was very close to his longtime friends, was a family man, enjoyed good health, didn't do drugs, had no psychological issues, and was somewhat shy to people he didn't know yet. However, he has a few attributes that predicted what he would do in the prison, such as his superpatriotism to America and his fear of rejection - “he changes his mind to accommodate others so that they will not be ‘mad at me or hate me.’ Others can influence him even when he believes that he has made up his mind. He does not like to be alone; he likes to be around others, and he becomes depressed when he is alone for any length of time” (338). Zimbardo describes that Frederick’s army record is pretty good - the comments involving his service as a correctional officer are “uniformly positive,” as noted in the following ones: “‘He is a very good officer and shows leadership abilities,’” “‘His appearance exceeds expectations,’” ‘“Officer Frederick meets all criteria and has the potential to be an excellent officer’” (340). Zimbardo attributes Frederick’s inhumane actions to his desire to fit in with his colleagues, as well as to the errors in the system of command: in the army, people always have to obey their superiors (for good reason, but people should also think for themselves). Frederick, placed on trial for his misdemeanors, pled guilty to the allegations. Zimbardo states that he believed the sentence to be too extreme, considering the factors that caused him to do what he did. Zimbardo also examines Frederick’s life after he became prisoner 789689, as he describes how Frederick was put into solitary confinement despite the fact that he was no longer in Abu Ghraib and posed no danger to himself or to others. This clearly demonstrates that inhumane actions should be rewarded with punishment, as people should hold themselves accountable for their own deeds.
Zimbardo talks more of those involved in Abu Ghraib and the factors which influenced them, until he discusses what people can do to prevent The Lucifer Effect from happening to them. He encourages people to admit when they do make mistakes to prevent future ones, to practice mindfulness to prevent lapses in judgement, to hold themselves accountable for what they will do, to maintain their individuality, to respect just authority but to rebel against unjust ones, to value friendship and comrades but to value independence at the same time, to try to look at the situation objectively, without outside bias, to remember the past and the future, to value their freedom, and to remind themselves that they do indeed have some degree of freedom, no matter what scenario they are in. Zimbardo also states that heroism can be practiced by many people, whether in a single moment or throughout their entire lives. Some people, like Rosa Parks, become heroes in an instant. Others, like Nelson Mandela, become heroes over a lifetime. Both kinds of heroism are admirable and should be practiced. Zimbardo ends his book by admitting that even though the “banality of evil” is existent, the “banality of good” exists too, as “For reasons we do not yet fully understand, thousands of ordinary people in every country around the world, when they are placed in special circumstances, make the decision to act heroically” (488). Zimbardo also states that many of the heroes who should be admired are not famous or rich, as they simply have solid values and consistency. These include “the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, under-paid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs” (488). Zimbardo ends his book by saying the following message, which should be quoted in his own words on page 488: “And so, the parting message that we might derive from our long journey into the heart of darkness and back again is that heroic acts and the people who engage in them should be celebrated. They form essential links among us; they forge our Human Connection. The evil that persists in our midst must be countered, and eventually overcome, by the greater good in the collective hearts and personal heroic resolve of Everyman and Everywoman … we are reminded by the Russian poet and former prisoner in Stalin’s Gulag Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: ‘The line dividing good and evil cuts through the center of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’”
Personal thoughts:
The Lucifer Effect, in short, is a fantastic book. In a culture where people are commonly presented as either good or evil (ex. Disney movies), a book like The Lucifer Effect is a breath of fresh air, for it shows the very realistic causes of what makes people do unethical things. As stated before, it is also a call-to-action, which calls on people to listen to the better angels of their nature, and, at the very least, to practice decency and self-control. Though it is detailed overall, I am glad for its detail, for it describes a very complicated topic. Where a cursory explanation would fail, a detailed one will succeed. I recommend The Lucifer Effect for anyone interested in human behavior, psychology, history, and explanatory texts.
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