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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil | 
 enlarge | Author: Philip Zimbardo
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
Buy New: $10.09
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Rating:  66 reviews
Sales Rank: 2146
Media: Paperback
Pages: 576
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0812974441
Dewey Decimal Number: 150
EAN: 9780812974447
ASIN: 0812974441
Publication Date: January 22, 2008
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Product 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 61 more reviews...
 Long and appreciated December 10, 2008
Mona G. Affinito (Chaska, Minnesota)
I guess the plethora of reviews testifies to the importance of this book. And I'll assume that my response is directly related to the number of years I taught social psychology. While others found it boring or tedious, I was grateful to have the full description of the prisoner/guard research. While others found that he strayed from his theme, I found it well-developed and appropriately sequential. Most of all, it brought back memories of my colleague emerging ashen-faced from his 75 minute class where he had done a quick replication of the Zimbardo study. "I'll never do that again," was his message as he reeled from the observation that his class had so quickly fallen into the roles. Deny it, vilify it, accuse it of failing to meet standards of experimental rigor. Even suggest that the subjects were war protesters (if that's true) which indeed makes the effect even more powerful. But I hope readers don't allow themselves to fall into denial of the potential for cruelty in us all. If we really want to solve the problems that face us, then we need to face ourselves.
Fascinating November 24, 2008
Melissa in Houston (USA)
If you ever wanted to know why people can stand idly by while someone commits a crime, commits an act of cruely against a child or animal, or motivates the populace into mass homicide, then this book is for you.
It covers the spectrum from every day occurances and seemingly innocent acts of "minding my own business" to how this can be used as an excuse for ignoring some of the world's injustices. A big part of this is the abu graib instances, but you could probably as easily apply it to Nazi Germany or Jonestown.
His idea of what a "hero" truly is in our society, someone who stands up against what they are told and does what they believe is right, is amazing.
If, like me, you like to delve into how your fellow humans think and what motivates them to do the things they do, then this book is for you.
The Yahweh effect November 1, 2008
Lucifer (www.bobshakespeare.com)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
As noted on the jacket, "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."
Prof. Zimbardo's lab subjects were American college students--your ordinary, beer-drinking, fun-loving, fornicating liberal humanists. What possessed them to enter into Dr. Zimbardo's laboratory and suddenly start acting like evangelical Christians? These were not bad kids! But under the direction of an authoritative patriarchal figure, many of the kids quickly consented to the torture of those subjects who believed the wrong way, or who could not remember the right answer.
My one beef with this book is that Prof. Zimbardo has taken my name in vain: "The Lucifer Effect." Seriously: Zimbardo's title annoys the hell out of me. When have I ever taken pleasure in the suffering, or starvation, or military defeat, or disease, or damnation, of a culture different from my own? If I EVER behave myself like an evangelical Christian, especially an American one, bind me in adamantine chains and lock me up in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay. I've gotten some bad press over the years, but I'm basically a good guy, and I am the same yesterday, today, and forever.
God, on the other hand, is...
No, the less said about God the better. If I tell you the truth, He will hurt me, and for a very long time. But you can look it up: it's in the Bible.
When dictating the Old and New Testaments, the holy Ghost often sounds embarrassed that the Father, when angry, behaves so badly - which would elevate my opinion of the Ghost except that the Bible always takes the line that Yahveh is an holy and inscrutable Father who can do as He pleases without asking children like you or me for their moral approval. The Old Testament is a bloody book, recording the massacre of more than one million civilians whom the Lord killed on a whim, or who were killed at His command during impulsive fits of divine wrath - and countless thousands more whom your heavenly Father slew in plagues, storms, earthquakes, and famine, most often for an honest mistake made by someone in their government, as with King David and his census or, worse, when some tinpot Bronze Age king paid his respects to the wrong divinity.
Although the name Yahveh, means "Jealous," the Lord has said He dislikes being made jealous or angry (Exod. 34:14). It does not thrill Him to hurt people. And He can still be incredibly patient, for days on end. In fact, the Lord never used to be irascible at all, prior to Creation. But there is just something about Earth people (Jewish people in particular) that sets Him off. And when He feels jealous, which is most of the time, your heavenly Father freely admits, in the Scriptures, to having performed "evil" deeds (in Hebrew, ra, applied dozens of times to God's behavior; and elsewhere in Scripture, to arson, cannibalism, fratricide, incest, infanticide, matricide, patricide, sister-rape, slander, theft, treachery, adultery, homosexuality, murder, and tree-worship. God's "evil" has lately been euphemised, in the New Age New International Version, in order to sell more Bibles, under the less unpleasant word, "trouble"; thereby to conform with modern, extrabiblical English; as, say, in the phrase, "Almighty God in the 1930s and early 40s permitted German Jews to suffer ra (a little bit of trouble).
The Lord uses His "evil" (ra) to keep all men, but especially the Jews, on their toes: "Thus says Yahveh, the God of Israel: "Look to it! I shall bring such evil ... that whosoever hears of it, both his ears shall tingle!" (2 Kings 21:12, KJV). If your own ears tingled when you first learned about what the Christian Serbs did to the Muslims in Croatia, or what the Lutherans did to the Jews in Hitler's Germany, or what David did to the Ammonites in Palestine; or if you felt even the slightest little tingle when you heard about what the Americans did to Iraqi Muslims at Abu Ghraib; then you may thank the Lord for the sensation, because He played a role in each one of those capers.
Here is how the Lord justifies His bad behavior: if I hurt My own creatures, that does not make Me a "bad" person, but only "mischievous." As it is written: "He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person" (Proverbs 24:8, KJV).
I'm not making any of this up. Sometimes I wish people WOULD read the Word of God.
--L
good October 28, 2008
shawny (riverside ca usa)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
its a good book to read especially if your into psychology it is also a good ethics review(i used it in that class).if ur a casual reader it still a good buy.
 Excellent October 16, 2008
Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Everyone has their biases, but the thing that distinguishes a real intellectual from a phony is recognizing the bias and moving on. This thought struck me as I read social psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo's 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect. I received the book gratis, from the publisher, because I will be interviewing Zimbardo at a later date, and immediately I thought of the book The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, a man I'd interviewed a few years ago. That earlier book, while a good read, was in no way a book that used hard science, nor the scientific method, to approach the subject of humans and evil. Bloom's book was, in many ways, a modern echo of the Thomas Hobbesian view of mankind as an evil agent just waiting to bust loose, even if leavened by claims that `evil,' or the propensity toward violence, is a natural outcome of evolutionary selection. Zimbardo resists both supernaturalism and philosophic psychobabble when he claims that evil is merely a system of intentional harm, abuse, and dehumanization of innocents, whether by direct or indirect means.
Zimbardo's book, by contrast, is more grounded in experimentation, documentation, and less malleable and subjective than Bloom's book; despite Zimbardo's critics often railing against his methods as `unscientific.' Yet, perhaps because of Zimbardo's book's title's similarity with Bloom's, I was preparing for another metaphysical trip into pop culture's tangential nod with science. I was, admittedly biased to be skeptical about the book, but, as I am a good critic, and had let past biases toward such works of art, as It's A Wonderful Life, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, and The Curse Of The Cat People, rob me of their insight for too long, I dashed all expectations and was rewarded early on, starting with Zimbardo's excellent Preface to the book, wherein he documents personal and professional things which led up to the book's release, over three decades in the making.... The book also delves into cultural ritualism, such as the usage of masks and military uniforms to deindividuate persons into parts of a `machine' to get them to commit acts of violence. It's an ancient and effective technique, of course, and Zimbardo does a far better job of explaining the whys and wherefores of such things than did a charlatan like Joseph Campbell. The book has many great qualities, although it clearly is not for all readers. People with a video game mindset will get bored the first time Zimbardo digresses for a page or two to explain something, and many others will likely just skim through the long sections on the SPE and Abu Ghraib. However, for those wanting to get a fundamental understanding into the nature of why men do bad things, The Lucifer Effect, is a good start, and far easier to sift through than typical psychological texts or those which become more well known for the times they were written in than anything immanent (think of any book by Magnus Hirschfeld). In short, read this book with an open mind, and you will likely have a different opinion on many of the things you take for granted when you flip on the tv, watch the latest daily horror from around the world or around the corner. And for those you don't, this book may explain why. Having one's cake, yet eating it too, need not always be a desideratum, need it?
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