“The Lucifer Effect” by Philip Zimbardo – The Monster Metamorphosis

An overwhelming majority of people rightfully consider themselves as being peaceful citizens who wouldn't be capable of committing acts of unspeakable terror.

There are many who believe that they are incapable of doing such things because their nature simply won't allow them to, no matter what happens.

Perhaps that is true for a small number of them, but as Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated it, chances are evil lurks within every single one of us, waiting for its chance to burst free.

In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo revisits these harrowing few days he spent running his daring experiment, which by the way had to be aborted prematurely due to the loss of control and abuse perpetrated by the “prison guards” on “the prisoners”.

In this book, Zimbardo explores in detail the psychological processes through which the subjects went through, explaining how little by little, group dynamics, uncontrollable situational forces, undeserved hostility, the demand for submission, and numerous other factors eventually led ordinary, happy college students to become sadistic guards and psychologically-troubled prisoners.

The knowledge obtained from examining this study is also put to other use beyond it, being applied to numerous scenarios in modern times. Zimbardo attempts to use the various principles learned from his experiment to explain the many atrocities men have and are committing on each other.

He tries to explain how they lead to an air of ruthlessness in the business world, how those processes led the American soldiers to dehumanize and commit unspeakable acts of torture in Abu Ghraib.

In the end, Zimbardo professes the idea that it is not the individual that corrupts the environment, but rather the other way around; when placed in the proper environmental circumstances, a person can be driven far beyond boundaries they believed could never be reached.

As one would expect from this type of book, it wasn't written so much to entertain as to try and shed light on perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of human nature. If this subject interests you in the slightest though, I guarantee that the occasional dryness found in the style won't bother you at all: Zimbardo makes it a point to keep things simple while still giving in-depth explanations, never dwelling on things which aren't important.

One must remember that he is, before anything, a psychologist, a researcher, a scientist. He daringly explores one of the most unsettling things about this world, in hopes of perhaps helping us to overcome it. If you have any interest in the human mind, I can't overstate how much of an eye-opener this book can be: definitely worth a read.

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Philip George Zimbardo Philip Zimbardo is a renowned psychologist, author and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. His name became synonymous with the famous (or infamous?) 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, after which he became the author of a large number of psychologically-geared books, such as The Lucifer Effect and The Time Paradox.