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.

Since The Lucifer Effect (TLE) was published in late March 2007, I have given more than a hundred media interviews and lectures at colleges and conferences, read the many reviews of my book, and responded to much reader feedback. In the process of doing so, I have learned that some misconceptions exist about my views, which I will attempt to correct here. In addition, I have had some new ideas that I want to deal with briefly before you start reading.

First, what is the Lucifer effect: It is many different, but related, things. Initially, it is the story of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel. Lucifer, aka "The Morning Star," into Satan, the Devil, because he committed the twin sins of Disobedience to God and Pride ("that goeth before a fall"). It was God, according to ancient scriptures, who created Hell as a space to embrace all the fallen angels and those humans who would later yield to their temptations.

That is the most extreme arc of transformation imaginable, and so sets the context for my Investigations Into lesser human transformations of good, ordi-nary people, not angels, into perpetrators of evil in response to the corrosive influence of powerful situational forces. Those forces that exist in many common behavioral contexts are more likely to distort our usual good nature by pushing us toward engaging in deviant, destructive, or evil behavior when the settings are new and unfamiliar. When embedded in them, our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting no longer function to sustain the moral compass that has guided us reliably in the past.

I challenge the traditional focus on the individual's inner nature, dispositions, personality trails, and character as the primary and often the sole target in understanding human fallings. Instead, I argue that while most people are good most of the time, they can be readily seduced into engaging in what would nor-mally qualify as ego-alien deeds, as antisocial, as destructive of others. Thai se-duction or Initiation Into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures Improvising soliloquies on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often in an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and direc-tors. Together, they comprise situational features we must come to appreciate as influencing how behavior can he dramatically modified. By recognizing the impact of those off the stage, in the wings, who make the human drama work for any given play, we implicate systemic features into our analysis. Thus TLE is a call for a three-part analysis of human action by trying to understand what individual actors bring into any setting, what situational forces bring out of those actors, and how system forces create and maintain situations.

Most institutions in any society that is invested in an individualistic orientation hold up the person as sinner, culpable, afflicted, insane, or irrational. Programs of change follow a medical model of dealing only at the Individual level of rehabilitation, therapy, reeducation and medical treatments, or punishment and execution. All such programs are doomed to fail if the main causal agent is the situation or system and not just the person. TLE calls for a paradigm shift of two kinds. We need to adopt a public health model for prevention of evil, of violence, spouse abuse, bullying, prejudice, and more that identifies vectors of social dis-ease to be inoculated against, not dealt with solely at the Individual level. A sec-ond paradigmatic shift is directed at legal theory to reconsider the extent to which powerful situational and systemic factors must be taken into greater account in sentencing mitigation.

Although much of this book details how easy it is for ordinary people to begin to engage in evil deeds, or to be passively Indifferent to the suffering of others, the deeper message is a positive one. It is by understanding the how and why of such evils that we are all in a better position to uncover, oppose, defy, and triumph over them. By becoming more "evil smart," we build up a firm resistance to having our moral compass reset negatively. In this sense, TLE is a celebration of the human capacity to choose kindness over cruelty, caring over indifference, creativity over destructiveness, and heroism over villainy. For me, the most important part of the journey you are about to embark upon comes at the very end. Chapter 16 invites you first to consider fundamental strategies of resisting unwanted social influences, of ways to actively challenge social temptations that you face regularly. Then it introduces the notion of ordinary or everyday heroes, an invitation for you to join this growing band of citizens who act on behalf of others when yet others are doing evil or doing nothing to stop it. I propose the same situational perspective for heroism as for evil: the very same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination and evil in some of us can inspire the heroic imagination on others. My new mission is promoting this conception of teaching people, especially our children, to think of themselves as "heroes-in-waiting," ready to lake a heroic action in a particular situation that may occur only once in their lifetime.

Now it is time to begin our journey into a special heart of darkness.

As Italians say, Andiamo!
November 9, 2007

© 2008 by Philip Zimbardo.

Tags: Psychology & Psychiatry, Mental Health

About the Author

Philip Zimbardo is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and has also taught at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University. He is the co-author of Psychology and Life and author of Shyness, which together have sold more than 2.5 million copies. Zimbardo has been president of the American Psychological Association and is now director of the Stanford Center on Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism. He also narrated the award-winning PBS series Discovering Psychology, which he helped create. In 2004, he acted as an expert witness in the court-martial hearings of one of the American army reservists accused of criminal behavior in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His informative website, www.prisonexperiment.org is visited by millions every year. Visit the author's personal website at www.zimbardo.com.