Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect

Before reading “The Lucifer Effect”, I must admit to my suspicions that Psychologist Philip Zimbardo was writing an attempt at self-justification. Being known as the evil man who enabled the gruesome conditions in the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) would no doubt be burdensome, and disputing the title is expected. I was pleasantly surprised to find Zimbardo’s writing to lack excuses and, instead, be packed with honesty. He seemed to be writing his direct thoughts without a filter (when discussing Prisoner Doug-8612’s plan at a prison break, Zimbardo stated his priority to “keep the prison running at all costs- and, oh, yes, the experiment as well!”). He completely exposed the extent of his transformation from the role of primarily being a

Be it Rwanda’s Pauline leading her trusting people to certain rapes and deaths, or Hutu militia murdering ‘animal’ Tutsis, or Generals at Abu Ghraib prison allowing torture, or even the cruel guards of the SPE, Zimbardo attributed all the atrocities to be situational, not dispositional. He makes an extremely strong case for this following his detailed narrative of occurrences in the SPE. Comparisons between the subjects before the SPE showed all of them (prisoners and guards) to have dispositional character traits that differed in statistically insignificant ways- they were interchangeable, and all had normal characteristics within the 40-60th percentiles, the very definition of normal. During the experiment, characteristics arose solely due to the nature of the situation- prisoners strongly sunk into conformity, while guards increased in maliciousness. Post-experiment, all of them reverted to their previous dispositional states. Their normal personas were reinstated when the situational forces were removed. Zimbardo reiterated the idea that disposition has little to no impact on behavior given the right situation constantly: every narration of evil always reverted back to some form of “situation, not

Zimbardo goes over 10 steps to resist the power of the situation in the future: accept that you made a mistake; be mindful of your choices (do not operate on autopilot); take responsibility for your actions; consciously try to assert your individuality; respect just authority but rebel against unjust authority; accept the lure of social groups but value your independence; be frame-vigilant (understand the impact of slogans, etc); balance your time perspective (understand that you are not just living in the present/the future will be made based on your actions); assert that you will not sacrifice your freedoms for ‘security’ (do not be manipulated into engaging in alien actions for the sake of a promise of safety); finally, understand that you can oppose unjust systems. If we make an effort to recognize the impact situations can have on us, we will be able to combat them and do the right thing, as