The Lucifer Effect

The Lucifer Effect is a book by Philip Zimbardo that explains why you’re not always a good person, identifying the often misunderstood line between good and evil that we all walk by uncovering the shocking results of the authors Stanford Prison Experiment and other cases that show how evil people can be.

Zimbardo says it is a common misperception that people are either good or evil. The fact is, personalities aren’t static, they change all the time. Just think about how you are around your best friend. Now think about how you are around little kids. Do you act the same in these situations? The answer is most likely no.

Your character is changeable. How you behave depends heavily on the social circumstances you’re in. This is the situational approach to understanding human behavior. It argues that what you do depends on the situation you’re in.

The famous Milgram experiment illustrated this. In the experiment, participants were told they were part of a study to improve memory. Subjects were told they would be in the role of a “teacher” whose job was to help the “learner,” who was an actor in a concealed room, memorize word pairs.

Every time the learner made a mistake, the teacher could push a button to punish them with an electric shock. For each additional mistake, the shock intensity was increased. As the voltage increased, the learner would act more and more distressed and in pain and made more mistakes.

Despite the fact that the learner seemed in distress, most teachers kept on increasing the shock level. Those that started to become reluctant were told it was part of the rules. In the end, 65 percent of the participants gave the learner the maximum, life-threatening amount of volts.

The participants weren’t all bad people, but this showed that under certain circumstances, ordinary people could do horrible things.

The Stanford prison experiment also showed how quickly ordinary people can do cruel things. The author himself conducted this experiment while at Stanford Univerity. The idea was that he would put students into a mock prison and study their behavior. Zimbardo made sure that all of the participants came from similar middle-class backgrounds and had no record of psychological impairments or criminal behavior. Some were assigned to be guards and others were prisoners. The guards were given uniforms and wooden batons, and the prisoners were stripped naked, given a number instead of a name, and placed in a small cell. But what was shocking was how quickly this experiment got out of hand. Not long after it began, a prisoner disobeyed a guard, who retaliated by attacking him with a fire extinguisher. Soon, the guards came up with…