Tyler's Blog Death of Destiny

“The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is a psychology book written by Philip Zimbardo, the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. The book was approximately 500 pages long, and I found that it could be defined in five separate parts:

1. The Stanford Prison Experiment
2. Other Psychology Experiments
3. American Prisons
4. War
5. Conclusion

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was an experiment executed in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo and a team of researchers. They screened volunteers based on their physical and mental health, and picked 24 "normal" volunteers to act as participants in the study. Half of these volunteers were assigned the role of guards, and the other half were assigned the role of prisoners. The experiment was scheduled to last for 2 weeks, although it ended up being called off after only 6 days as the guards had become, as alluded to by the book, evil towards the prisoners. The witnessed changes were quite extreme, but I will leave describing of those changes to the book (or the website, if you'd prefer to read that).

Zimbardo briefly discusses several other psychology experiments including Milgram's experiment testing obedience to authority (as shown on this BBC show hosted by YouTube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) and a similar study done on puppies.

American prisons are then examined by Zimbardo and compared to his observations made during the SPE. He provides explanations on why prison guards act as they do. He also expresses his opinion on the effectiveness of prisons. Zimbardo goes on to describe military prisons such as Abu Ghraib, and again explains why people act why they do, and also his opinion on their operations.

The book concludes with what I found to be a lot of politics and some basic psychology (such as categories of heroism). Although the basic psychology was interesting, I wasn't as interested in the politics of "person A got charged with this (though he didn't deserve it)", etc.

Overall, I found the book to be pretty interesting. Although, it was longer than I expected, taking me probably 3 weeks (of bus time) to read it. Anyhow, I recommend this book to anybody interested in psychology or the SPE.