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Random House: U.S.A. and
U.K.
This is a book for our times,
a multilayered classic. What is truly remarkable is its blending of
sensitive personal exploration, brilliant social-psychological analysis, and
sustained ethical passion. If there has been a more
important and compelling book written in the last twenty-five years, I've
not encountered it. Phil Zimbardo's engaging and beautifully written tour de
force uncovers the sources of evil--big and small. The Lucifer Effect
accomplishes more than simply making the darkness visible; it also helps to
make lightness possible. It is crucial reading for everyone. Since the times of Job, and
maybe sometime before, we humans have always wondered whence evil comes. In
the Stanford Prison Experiment, Phil Zimbardo bottled evil in a laboratory.
The lessons he learned show us our dark nature but also fill us with hope if
we heed their counsel. The Lucifer Effect reads like a novel, is as profound
as the holiest of scriptures, and is at all times backed by sound scientific
research. As one of the Senior
Criminal Investigation Division agents who saw conditions at Abu Ghraib
first hand, it is clear to me that Phil Zimbardo truly understands all the
factors that came into play there. His book is a must read for
military leaders, mental health professionals and law enforcement officers. In another time, Philip
Zimbardo might be likened to an Old Testament prophet of doom, but the
author is not dealing with omens and unrealities, rather, quite the
opposite. His anatomy of human psychology and contemporary culture is as
scholarly as it is scary... This book takes us where angels fear to tread,
uncovering the 'Lucifer' that sits incubating in each individual and every
human institution. Politics, economics, history and even religion are all
revealed as being tainted with its evil spoor.. The professor's timely study
screams out at us to be on the alert, to be ever mindful and ever ready
least we fall into this heart of utter darkness. We should be grateful for
his insight and heed his warning...at our peril.
CONTENTS
Preface
CHAPTER NOTES
The Lucifer Effect raises a
fundamental question about the nature of human nature: How is it possible
for ordinary, average, even good people to become perpetrators of evil? In
trying to understand unusual, weird or aberrant behavior, we often err in
focusing exclusively on the inner determinants of genes, personality and
character, as we also tend to ignore what may be the critical catalyst for
behavior change in the external Situation or in the System that creates and
maintains such situations. This book is unique in many
ways. For starters, it provides for the first time a detailed chronology of
the transformations in character that took place during the experiment I
created many years ago that randomly assigned healthy, normal intelligent
college students to play the roles of prison or guard in a projected 2
week-long study. I was forced to terminate the study after only 6 days
because it went out of control, pacifists were becoming sadistic guards, and
normal kids were breaking down emotionally. By telling that story in a new
way, as my personal, first-person observation in present tense, it becomes
like a screen play filled with ever more amazing twists and turns as the
situational forces are pitted against individual will to resist and the
collective will to rebel against oppressive authority. In a sense, this
study and how I am reporting its narrative, is a forerunner of reality TV,
as we see ordinary people up close and personal day in and night out, become
transformed into something disturbing. This tale of agony and
transformation in a crucible of human nature is developed slowly and richly
over eight chapters, following the opening chapter that explains the Lucifer
Effect as the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel, Lucifer, into
Satan as he challenges God's authority. We shall here be considering less
dramatic transformations, but all on a human scale that potentially can
engage any of us. I lay the groundwork for the rest of the book by vivid
descriptions of torture in the Inquisition, rape and terror in Rwanda and
Nanking, and other venues where human nature has run amok. I also provide
the initial scaffolding for how the Stanford Prison Experiment may help us
make sense of the abuse and torture of prisoners by American Military Police
in Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Second, after this
narrative, with minimal psychologizing, we consider the conceptual
contributions and research findings from many domains that validate the
assertion of situational power over individual dispositions. I review
classic and some new research on, conformity, obedience to authority,
role-playing, dehumanization, deindividuation and moral disengagement. We
consider the “evil of inaction” as a new form of evil that supports those
who are the perpetrators of evil. Two chapters are inserted
between my telling the tale of 'the little shop of horrors' that I created
in the basement of Stanford's psychology department and these twin chapters
(12 & 13) on the social science foundations for understanding how powerful
but subtle situational forces can seduce people into evil. In chapters 10
and 11, we want to know more about the broader meaning of the Stanford
Prison Experiment, (SPE): What evidence was collected besides the
observations the reader has looked in on? What does it mean, what are the
take-home messages from this research? What about the ethical considerations
raised by this research that is surely "ethically sensitive," to say the
least? A Google search for the word
"experiment" uncovers a remarkable phenomenon: out of roughly 300 million
results, the Stanford Prison Experiment web site ranks first! For the word
"prison," the SPE web site ranks number two out of more than 150 million
results worldwide -- second only to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons. That notoriety of this
study is traced to examine extensions and replications of the SPE in
research, the media, and recently as an art form, with critical analyses of
the good and the bad directions that have been taken. Next, the book is unique in
systematically applying the lessons learned from the SPE and social science
research to a new understanding of the abuses at Abu Ghraib (chapter 14). I
do this by integrating my psychological expertise with my special expertise
gained by being an expert witness for one of the accused Military Policemen
involved in the abuses, Sgt Ivan "Chip" Frederick. I have gotten to know him
well and switched my roles into that of investigative reporter as I tracked
down his performance evaluations as prison guard in the states, the basis of
his 9 medals and awards, corresponding with his wife, Martha and sister,
Mimi, and engaging psychologists to provide personality and pathology
assessments. I have also been able to get special insights into the nature
of that horrid prison from military officers who have worked there. As an
expert witness, I also had access to many of the independent investigations
into these abuses and all of the digitally documented images of depravity
that took place on Tier 1A Night Shift. So in putting Chip Frederick on
trial, I give a detailed depiction of what it was like to walk in his boots
for 12-hour night shifts without a day off for 40 straight nights. Chip got sentenced to an
8-year hard time in military prison, dishonorably discharged, disgraced and
deprived on his 22 years of retirement savings, divorced by his wife and is
now nearly broken. We see his transformation from good guard to bad guard to
prisoner as one instance of the Lucifer Effect. But now in Chapter 15, it is
my turn to again shift roles and become the prosecutor who puts the System
on trial, the Military Command and the Bush Administration for their
complicity in being part of the System that created and maintained this and
other torture-interrogation centers across many military prisons. Using the
many official independent investigative reports as my sources, all of which
I have read carefully, I document what they tell us about the seminal cause
of the abuses in the Leadership that was dysfunctional, irresponsible,
conflicting or just absent. After laying out the extent
to which the abuses at Abu Ghraib paled in comparison to the more extremely
violent and lethal torture and abuses in many other military sites, with
testimonies of soldiers who actually took part in them, it is time for the
reader as juror to decide was it just the work of those 7 "bad apples," or
that of a corrupt system, a "rotten barrel," that has sacrificed basic human
values of rule of law, honesty, and support of the Geneva Conventions for
its obsession with the so-called "war on terror." Wow, this is a lot of
negative stuff coming down! But optimism is around the corner. I end Chapter
15 with an encouraging story of how an Army Colonel, a military psychologist
friend, of mine, took the DVD of my prison study to Abu Ghraib as a training
device to teach the new guards about the corrosive effects of the power in
their hands in that remote place. He was sent there to develop new
procedures to prevent the recurrence of such abuses—and has done so
effectively. Then the sun shines and
lights up the dungeons we have been inhabiting for the past 15 chapters in
our final chapter 16. Although most people succumb to the power of
situational forces, not all do. How do they resist social influence? What
kinds of strategies might help the reader to become inoculated against
unwanted attempts to get him or her to conform, comply, obey, and yield? I
outline a 10-step generic program to build resistance to mind control
strategies and tactics. There is also a unique presentation of a thought
experiment to involve people in engaging in progressively greater degrees of
altruistic deeds that promote civic virtue. Given that the majority of
people in my research and those of my colleagues are impacted by situational
forces, it is the minority, the rare person, who resists. I consider them to
be heroes. So I end this long journey with a new understanding of what it
means to be heroic. We celebrate heroes and heroism as part of new taxonomy
that I have developed, which identifies 12 different hero types, with
criteria and exemplars, The first such exemplar takes us back to the SPE
with Christina Maslach, the young woman who forced me to terminate the
experiment (and who I later married and is the mother of our two daughters).
The second is Pvt. Joe Darby, the Abu Ghraib whistle blower who exposed the
abuses and tortures taking place, and forced their termination. No one has
ever elaborated on the nature of heroism as I have here. Finally, we end
with a novel twist to our long tale. After considering "The banality of
evil" as everyman and every woman's potential for engaging in evil deeds
despite their generally moral upbringing and pro-social life style, like
Adolph Eichmann, I introduce the new concept of: "The Banality of Heroism." Heroes come in two main
casts; life-long heroes, like Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi,
Mother Teresa, and heroes of the moment, such as, whistle blowers, those who
perform sudden acts of bravery on the battle field, or of spontaneous
courage on the home front. Those heroes of the moment typically have never
before done anything else that was memorable, but they responded to the call
to service when they heard it. So any of us may become heroes by being ready
to do the good thing, to help others in need when the situational demands
give us that rare opportunity. I end with that challenge: When the time
comes for you to act the part of the hero, will you be ready for the casting
call?
(As a consequence of
writing this book and beginning to focus on the positive side of human
nature- the heroic imagination--I have begun new research designed to
understand the heroic decision at the time of taking a heroic stand against
unjust authority; and also to develop a new web site devoted to celebrating
heroes and heroism.)
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