Philip Zimbardo (1933–2024)

The Lucifer Effect is an interesting but grossly overwrought and ponderous study of relative good and evil in the human psyche. Philip Zimbardo's thesis is that, regardless of background, belief structure or personal traits, everyone has within them the capacity for good and evil and that whichever of these is brought out is determined by the situation they find themselves in and the system by which they operate. Zimbardo was the psychologist in charge of the infamous Stanford Prison show more Experiment in 1971, when a group of ordinary people volunteering for a university study were split into two groups: prisoners and guards. The project was abandoned less than a week in, as 'guards' became increasingly abusive and 'prisoners' alarmingly pathological. Zimbardo's experiences in this infamous psychological experiment are recounted in (excruciating) detail in a narrative that forms the first part of this book. The second part deals with the lessons learned from this experiment, in which Zimbardo's thesis and conclusions are expanded on. The third part applies the lessons of Stanford to the abuses which occurred at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003-4, and a fourth, much shorter part deals with the 'banality' of everyday heroism and goodness (which seems like a fillip, after the previous 400 pages of examples of human cruelty and misery, of reminding us that we're not all bad all of the time).

The stuff Zimbardo is discussing can be quite arresting and despite the numerous flaws in The Lucifer Effect (which I shall come onto) this look into the human abyss did maintain my interest. The acknowledgement, backed up by empirical data and psychological analysis, that humans are capable of both good and evil is an important one. Even in our supposedly enlightened modern age, we too often rely on the crutch of absolute good and evil when explaining people's actions. Zimbardo not only provides conclusive (if exhaustive) proof that this is a fallacy, but also touches on why this is dangerous. Very early on, he notes how the traditional view lets 'good' people off the responsibility hook" when bad things happen (pp 6-7), discouraging reform and change as 'nothing could have been done to stop them – they're just evil'. It encourages ignorance, injustice and complicity. Nevertheless, he is keen to note that acknowledging the role of 'the System' in creating a situation that allows people to do bad things does not make him an apologist for evil, only that we should be realistic in acknowledging how unusual and stressful circumstances can change psychological behaviour and how lazy systemic operating practices can permit or even encourage abuses. As he says with regards to Abu Ghraib, had the American civil and military authorities invested even "a fraction of that attention, concern and resources" to oversight and administration of the Iraqi prison system that they did to the disciplining of the crude jailors after the horse had bolted, there would have been no need for any trials (pg. 370).

Nevertheless, despite the importance of the topic and the strength of Zimbardo's argument, there were significant flaws in the book. The writing style is quite dry and clinical – like an academic monograph – and there is little discrimination in the examples provided (i.e. rather than choose between two suitable case studies to illustrate his point, he just gives us both). To exacerbate this, the author repeats himself ad nauseam, drumming his arguments into the reader with the same phrases, examples and quotations over and over like a broken record player. I only read The Lucifer Effect once, but by the time I closed it I felt like I had read it five times. Part of me wonders whether Zimbardo was mischievously conducting his own psychological experiment into the effects of déjà vu.

I also found Zimbardo's discussion of heroism towards the end of the book rather weak. He is less intellectually rigorous in analysing this than he was in discussing evil and the section seems like an afterthought, as if it were a fillip after the previous 400 pages of examples of human cruelty and misery to remind us that we're not all bad all of the time. His 'heroes' are chosen with obvious and unscientific bias, and include the dogmatic puritan Mother Teresa and his own wife. Mother Teresa is here apparently only on reputation, which was built up by an uncritical Western media which ignored (and continues to ignore) the more unsavoury aspects of her life's work (I don't find it a coincidence that Zimbardo was raised a Catholic). His wife – the psychologist Christina Maslach – was the one who dissented when the Stanford Prison Experiment got out of control, which persuaded Zimbardo to belatedly pull the plug on the whole thing. This makes her a woman of integrity, to be sure, but hardly a hero. When Zimbardo dedicates the book at the start to his "serene heroine" wife I took it to be husbandly affection. Yet he uses this label whenever her name pops up throughout the book, so much so that part of me wonders whether Zimbardo was mischievously conducting his own psychological experiment into the effects of déjà vu...

A further flaw in The Lucifer Effect is that it becomes intensely political. Early on, Zimbardo is patting himself on the back for his involvement in left-wing, anti-war student activism in the Sixties and Seventies. I accepted this as an authorial affectation but later on, after discussing Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo begins to go wildly beyond his remit for the book. He starts imagining Bush Administration officials on trial for crimes against humanity, styling himself as an investigative reporter (even though, as he admits, he repeatedly refused to take an active part in the Abu Ghraib investigations as he was scared of entering the Iraq war-zone). By the time he suggests Jonestown was sponsored by the CIA (pg. 479), I was well and truly ready to be done with his book. It doesn't matter if you agree with his views – and, in some respects, I do (about Abu Ghraib) – but he's not being objective in his thesis by this point. His left-wing activist bias has broken through and started to set fire to the wagons and you do begin to wonder... When he's talking about 'the System' and how it creates situations that compel people to do bad things, is he thinking back to his radical days and the mantras about how 'the Man' always beat people down? His thesis is strong enough to withstand these doubts, but it does wipe away some of the gloss.

Despite these weaknesses, The Lucifer Effect did forward a thought-provoking thesis and I finished it with a greater appreciation for, as Zimbardo says, "the ways in which humanity can be transformed by power and powerlessness" (pg. 195). It is powerful and unnerving stuff to read at times, despite some debilitating bias and tonal errors (he ends this bleak journey into the heart of human darkness not with a lofty summation or open-ended food for thought but a flippant, personal "Thanks for sharing this journey with me. Ciao, Phil Zimbardo." (pg. 488)). One finishes it with a greater recognition of just how fragile our psyches are and how negligent we are of their defence. As Zimbardo shows, many of us in these high-pressured situations wouldn't be heroes or even decent people but would act as the guards did at Stanford or at Abu Ghraib. Not out of evil pique or moral corruption or sadistic fancy but because we are human – flawed and malleable. Too often, we "function on automatic pilot" (pg. 452), lazily drifting through life thinking we're the 'good guys'. But Zimbardo shows that evil behaviour is not induced by 'exotic' influences like brainwashing but by mundanity: normal people reacting to abnormal situations and systems (pg. 258). Most of the time, those who are doing bad things think they are doing it for the right reasons, and it is precisely this conviction that "oh no, we'd never do anything like that", which is potentially fatal. This "myth of our invulnerability to situational forces" is the very thing that makes us vulnerable, by "not being sufficiently vigilant" to the persuasiveness of these forces (pg. 211). To appropriate a phrase that Zimbardo uses repeatedly, we're not all bad apples but sometimes we can find ourselves floating in a bad barrel. The Lucifer Effect has enough flaws that it won't come to be seen as the definitive voice on this subject, but it is a powerful and disconcerting voice nonetheless." show less

For the first half of the book, Zimbardo gives us an excessive, messy account of each day of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) without much analysis or self-reflection. This already hurts the book from an engagement standpoint, especially since this portion stretches on for about two-hundred pages. While it's easy to comprehend, it's repetitive and lacks polish.

As for the second half, the writing is often gaudy and full of exaggerations. Zimbardo is fond of using quotes from fictional show more and non-fictional sources alike, but these are often cherry-picked while ignoring their broader context. Many arguments are just plain unconvincing due to their shaky basis.

To give an example that typifies this weaknesses: At one point further along, Zimbardo uses Lord of the Flies to illustrate a point about how a group--thrust from comfort into a hostile or indifferent environment--may find it imperative to toss aside their morals in favor of survival. Zimbardo highlights the part where one of the children paints his face and thus creates a new sort of identity (via deindividuation), supposedly free of his Christian morality and free to kill a pig. However, these are just children brought up a certain way without really knowing why, and suddenly--with newfound freedom and desperation--a brutal hierarchy emerges among them. Zimbardo concludes that this is proof of similar behavior that arose in the SPE. But doesn't this seem too simplistic an answer? There's a stark difference between both scenarios, chiefly that one (fictional) circumstance was unavoidable for the children, and that the other was a controlled experiment within a half-artificial environment in real life. Additionally, there's a big difference between children that are still developing vs. adults that have willingly signed up for a prison experiment. I would've liked to see Zimbardo talk more about these important distinctions rather than gloss over them.

Beyond this, there's a lot of jumping from subject to subject haphazardly; subjects that are similar enough to each other that it just adds more to the repetitive nature the book. I was waiting for some new ground to be covered but it never happened. Sometimes I'd find myself staring at a new section in confusion, swearing that I'd just read through it. Thumbing back through the book proved that Zimbardo was just regurgitating unvaried ideas over and over again.

I also found that there's not enough devil's advocacy, pardon the pun. Zimbardo's "heroic examples" (as he calls them) are crammed into the end of the book, but I had anticipated a closer look at the ethical history of "good and evil" itself throughout the book and how it ties into the main message. Something like that never happens. However, I did notice that Zimbardo often comes across as self-serving and even gloating, as though his part to play in the infamous experiment shouldn't be criticized under the same light that he criticized his participants. He's quick to chalk up his role to his own deindividuation process as the prison warden, but he was the ringleader of the whole experiment and had to have been the most self-aware person there.

Why didn't Zimbardo introduce a heroic element to the SPE? I wonder how that would've changed things, especially since he didn't reserve a lot of space to speak on heroism but does offer both it and individualism as a counter to the evils talked about in this work. Still, it's a "solution" that fails to be convincing. There's just too much left out of the frame and too many holes in Zimbardo's methods.

And just where the hell is Lucifer? He gets mentioned and alluded to quite a number of times, but it's more like a loose tie-in used as a hook to keep you interested rather than being at the center of a well-written, comparative analysis on dangerous conformism, "othering" and the bystander effect throughout history. Oh well, was expecting a lot more from this book.

**End note: After writing this review, I came across an informative comment left on this particularly disparaging review. The commenter, Maxwell, explains how the SPE was less an experiment and more of a heavily coached demonstration; a lot less real than many popular viewpoints surrounding the SPE--and Zimbardo himself--will have you believe. Perhaps if Zimbardo had let a true experiment play out with very little information or coaching--and also if there'd been a heroic or "reindividuating" element introduced somewhere--events would have spun in a much different direction.

I also did a bit more digging and apparently I'm late to the party because the SPE has been thoroughly debunked. Here's a good source on that, it's concise and only fourteen pages long. I recommend reading it instead of wasting your time on The Lucifer Effect. show less

This book by the guy who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment—and who was the warden, and got sucked into abusing his power—is about half a detailed account of what actually happened in the SPE, blow by blow. There’s a really detailed website for the SPE with a lot of extra material, including video. The rest of the book is about other situations in which people abuse their power—and the parallels between the SPE and Abu Ghraib really are striking, down to the guards’ invention show more of sexual humiliations as a way to control and dehumanize their captives. Zimbardo strikingly illustrates how humans tend to blame the degraded for their own degradation—both in the SPE and at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners smelled bad, having been denied access to real toilet facilities, and this led the guards to think of them as dirty and unworthy. He argues that we too readily attribute bad behavior to individual disposition (rotten apples) rather than situational and structural factors (the construction of the barrel). This fundamental attribution error pervasively distracts us from the need to build better systems. At the end, he spends some time on heroism: the qualities that lead people to resist situational forces and stand up for what’s right. A disturbing but worthwhile book. show less

The description of the Stanford Prison Experiment (first half of the book) was difficult to read- not because it was poorly written, but because it was emotionally hard to swallow. I talked to the characters like I was yelling at a football game, trying to get them to stop what they were doing.

I have such respect for the author’s honesty regarding the responsibility he bore for the experiment, especially a description of how he manipulated the mother of one of the prisoners as she show more expressed her reservations, and how easy it was for him to slip into doing so.

My world was a little shaken as I read real-life descriptions of dehumanizing cruelty, and the culpability of those who don’t participate but commit the sin of inaction. It’s not enough to be the “good guy” by being a little nicer. One must act against brutality. I appreciate having my eyes opened, and this book gave me a passionate hunger to lay the foundation of a solid character now, to grow in fearlessness and integrity in preparation for ever meeting such situational evil face to face. Zimbardo helped me understand that under the “right” circumstances I could find that face in my mirror. That is a gift of wisdom beyond measure.

The photographs and descriptions of everything from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to the abuses at Abu Ghraib were a bit hard to see and read; this book is not for the faint of heart. I highly recommend it for the lessons it teaches.

I couldn't put it down and read it in 2 days- even when I did put it aside to take a cleansing breath a few times, I found myself picking it up again a few minutes later, unable to stop thinking about it. show less