The Lucifer Effect

If you've ever taken a college psych class, you've probably heard of Dr. Philip Zimbardo. If his name doesn't sound familiar, you might recognize his famous psychological experiment. Dr. Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment designed to study the psychology of imprisonment. What Dr. Zimbardo and his research team failed to realize was how quickly their makeshift prison would become a real prison for a handful of average college students.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil explores the concept of good versus evil and the gray space in between. It explores situational factors that allows the reader to step into the role of the research subject. It creates the impossible task of  hypothesizing what the reader would do in these instances. Would you, the prisoner in this scenario, adhere to the demanding and demeaning prison guards? Would you, the guard, force prisoners into sexually explicit stances? Would you stand up for what you believe in or would you face emotional defeat willingly?

 

This makeshift prison was shut down within a week due to the emotional distress the prisoners were facing. Of course, that doesn't mean the study was a failure. It became a real prison for the boys involved. Guards and prisoners alike were distraught with the way they acted during the experiment.

Dr. Zimbardo focuses on the Stanford Prison Experiment for roughly half of the book. The other half is spent drawing parallels between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the abuses at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Military run prison in Iraq. The blatant torture and abuses between guards and prisoners were recorded through a series of photos that the guards passed around to the other service members. Dr. Zimbardo was invited to discuss the nature of these photos and the situational factors surrounding them. While never dismissing or condoning the abuse, he does his best to explain why these things could have been happening in this prison. He goes on to describe how he experienced a similar phenomenon in his makeshift prison.

 

This book is nearly 500 pages of in depth darkness.

I'm glad I finally got to read this insane case study but I'm very glad to be putting all this evil behind me.