Customer Reviews

The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm slightly ashamed to say that I initially picked this up because if it's cover: Odd, I thought, for a book with Lucifer in the title NOT to have a leering demon or a vista of hell as a backdrop.

Then I thought about it for a bit.

We try to separate evil from ourselves (i.e. the good) and the mundane as best as we can but this book seeks to show us how apparently good and honest people can turn into the worst that humankind has to offer. I.e. it shows us how akin we are to those people that are classically termed as being evil (Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Elizabeth Bathory, assorted comic-book villains, etc).

Zimbardo, most famously known as the principal author of the Stanford Prison Experiment, seeks to divest us of our sensationalised view of evil and bring home to us how easy and ordinary it can be to slide down that slippery slope.

I had barely gotten 50 pages into the book when I found it impossible to put down: reading it was at times a harrowing experience, but if I wanted a pleasant read I wouldn't have picked up a book that is, for all intents and purposes, a window into the mindset of Evil. This is precisely what makes it so interesting.

It pulls no punches and doesn't try to give you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside (until the final chapters, that is). Most important of all, it seeks to make you challenge what you think you.

I feel compelled to give it full marks because it is one of the best books I have ever read; the fact that it makes you put your brain into gear and use your thinking muscles makes me want to add a 6th star.

I bought this book over two years ago after a discussion with some people who had read it and were discussing the Rwandan crisis outlined in the first chapter which describes how neighbours killed each other and their children.

This was hard reading but well worth it.

Zimbardo draws on extensive research to make the case for situational evil where systems conspire to produce evil actions by individuals who are morally culpable but generally at the bottom of teh chain. He makes the case against the US administration in the Abu Ghraib atrocities and shows how those at the bottom were pillored by the administration who had a responsibility to ensue systems were in palce to prevent abuse.

His last chapter on heroes is well worth reading and describes how ordinary people are often heroes. He has a useful chart about this and describes the attributes of heroes

This is a tough book to review.

On one hand, I'd like to give it five stars. Everyone needs to understand the effects of Group-Think and situational/opportunistic evil. The way Zimbardo exposes both his own failings in this regard, the Stamford Prison Experiment and Abu Graib are chilling to read. But from a readability perspective, this is a three star book. It's difficult to hang in there and keep reading until the investigation of the Iraqi prison fires up, and I almost didn't make it. This reads more like a university textbook, a cure for insomnia, than anything else.

It is well worth the read, though, as you really don't know quite how you'll act personally until you're in a situational/authoritative position. Power corrupts. A lack of power imprisons. Few have the strength of internal moral compass to navigate these treacherous waters without falling into one hole or the other. Both, ironically, are victims of human nature.

If you've ever wondered how humans can do the atrocities they do then this is a great insight. The author is experienced (The guy behind the Stanford experiments) and gives the reader valuable insight into how atrocities occur. I am a small time history buff and after meeting many nice Germans wondered how the camps in WW2 could have occurred. Met many soldiers (who have been psychologically screened) and wondered how their fellow soldiers could do what they did in Abu Ghraib. For some it will be confronting read. For others, an answer to what lies at the heart of humans. I suspect some will loathe this book but the author has backed up his findings. Personally I'd like to see this book essential reading in the high school system.

Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology became better know by the general public for his bestseller on the emergence of evil behavior by people in certain particular experimental and real social situations such as in universities, prisons and war. The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007) gathers descriptions of the author's and others' scientific experiments and general experience, supporting the main tenet that "anybody" may can commit evil (or good!) deeds depending on situational influences. Therefore the book concludes with a prophylactic chapter on "resisting situational influences and celebrating heroism". The chapter suggests a ten-step self-managed individual program which recalls a scheme of cognitive self-therapy or the Alcoholic Anonymous' twelve-steps rehabilitation program: it has the purpose of building individual and communal resilience against "undesirable influences and illegitimate attempts at persuasion", where the concepts of undesirability and illegitimacy, as many others in the book, appear to be taken for granted. The chapter also develops a taxonomy of social heroism where heroism is understood as the individual's "inner power, sense of personal agency, to resist evil external situational forces" (p. 180). The whole book strives towards making heroism, as well as evil, an egalitarian attribute of human nature rather than a rare feature of the elect few (p. 488).

A great part of the fascination exerted by this book seems to be caused by the medial success of the reported research, its anchorage in the research politics of the social network of its author, its encyclopedic referencing of books and empirical findings, and its outspokenness in reporting details of examples of the type "sex & violence" or evil cruelty in the West's recent history. All this unavoidably underscores the author's all too obvious good intentions and sincerely committed moral pathos, as well as the common reader's feeling of his own comparative goodness and political correctness. It is also attractive to believe that all people are good or at least morally neutral and become good or, especially, evil only as a result of external circumstances that evade our immediate sphere of responsibility. This fascination only works on those readers, possibly a majority, who have not prior knowledge of such examples by reading classics of the world literature at the heights of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Socratic dialogues, e.g. The Brothers Karamazov, where "the quest for God, the problem of Evil and suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels", or in the lowlands of the Enlightenment morality philosophically illustrated by the famous Marquis de Sade, e.g. in his novel Juliette. Not to mention the old and well known "classical" phenomena of hazing, and of crowd psychology that arguably influenced the emergence of fascist theories of leadership during the 1920s. If the reader (and Zimbardo) had read and seriously considered, say, Dostoyevsky and Sade they would have met much worse and unexplained behaviors which do not fit the book's conclusions and program. They would not have missed some philosophical and theological implications of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment that he neglects, and which historically were object of extensive intellectual debates that followed the publications of such classics. I will focus upon the way in which the book's misunderstanding runs through the text in the form of the key terms like "situational forces".

Throughout the book Zimbardo is focused on so called situational forces, but the term force, as the closely related term energy which he seldom if ever uses, is a metaphoric psychological entity, in analogy and contrast to the very carefully defined concept of force in the Newtonian world of de-humanized physics. This force, then, is used in the context of an undefined branch of a psychology which during centuries has talked about instincts, will, and motivations (not to mention phenomenological intentions) that belong to humans or, rather, to their psyche, spirit, mind, brain or whatever, but never their situations, whatever that means, as the undefined term is used in the book

There are some basic and serious conceptual shortcomings, which lead to an unfortunate underestimation of the complexity of the problem of evil. It is the same underestimations which prompted an assumed "marxist" like Leszek Kolakowski to write a whole book on Conversations with the devil, also translated as Talk of the Devil. Zimbardo's book evades the basic rational analyses that historically have been homed in philosophy, religion and theology. An example of what is evaded is, as we have seen, the consciousness of the essence and importance of action as related to "thinking" and "feeling" or, the absolutely most common word, in not concept, in the book: "force", such as in "external situational force" (p.180), akin to "situational imperatives" (p. 289).

What Zimbardo tries to expose with his numerous examples and recurring references to situational forces is a very old and well know human problem, which in contrast to his approach has been framed taking into account historical approaches and Christian philosophy of religion. It disapproves sheer autonomy of so-called "critical" reason, which turns out to be a rather frivolous criticality, very often adduced by the author. Furthermore, Blondel's heteronomy includes Zimbardo's situational forces. Christian philosophy has the advantage of taking into consideration what Zimbardo hides in his ambiguous and vague attitude to authority which despite its minimal appearance in the book's index is repeatedly mentioned as a negative entity throughout the text, equated to the "system" and, further, to unjust system. Its only appearance in a possibly just and positive connotation is in the mention of respect for just authority (p. 454, and 213 but only under the connotation of role). And from the pragmatic point of view it is not possible to critically review all authority since most of our knowledge has to rely directly or indirectly on autonomously unchallenged authority, as show by Steven Shapin in his A Social History of Truth (1994).

Zimbardo misses one main point in his own chain of facts and arguments: the place of love. The issue of love itself seems to mentioned only once, and it is dismissed immediately in an awkward sentence well below the level of analysis of friendship (cf. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics): "Knowing when to stay involved with others, when to support and be loyal to a cause or a relationship rather than dismissing it, is a delicate question that we all face regularly" (p. 447). It is remarkable if not startling that the author's does not dwell upon the fact that his insight into his own evil-doing in the course of the famous "Stanford Prison Experiment" (SPE), as reported and analyzed in the book, came from a young woman, Christina Maslach (pp. 163, 168-171). He was in love with and dating her at the time, in a situation and process that is remarkably and significantly analogous to Pentagon Papers' Daniel Ellsberg in relation to his future wife Patricia Marx, as told in the documentary film The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009 Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature). Christina had been his teaching assistant, research collaborator, and informal editor of several of his books. They eventually married and the whole book is dedicated to her. An incident which came to be a threat to their relationship is described in the book as having been her shock and disappointment with Zimbardo when coming into contact with the research experimental situation he had managed, to which she reacted with something like "What you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing!" (p. 171). Zimbardo reports that after having felt threatened to loose her love he got a sudden and growing insight into the evil he was inflicting to the experimental subjects, causing him to discontinue the experiment, in a process, which eventually led to the book itself.

The reason why Zimbardo was allowed and able to set up his experiments, why he was trusted by his experimental subjects (in fact, objects), and why his experimental results were accepted must have been his social competence and commitment-pathos grounded in a solid academic reputation as a successful psychological scientist at one of USA's tops universities which later also gave a halo effect to the SPE "Stanford Prison Experiment". This can be seen as a special awkward example of "adult role playing" that Zimbardo condemns (p. 217). It is a play he implements anew in the writing and distribution of the book whose prestige borrows from or recycles his previously abused prestige. The industrialization of the serendipitous outcomes of this experiment apparently allowed that the book be backed by an enormous amount of references of all sorts including methodological considerations. They culminate with psychological technical conceptions (pp. 197-210) that must be impenetrable for the average amateur reader. On the top of this Zimbardo acknowledges that his or (as he softens the concession) all research is "artificial" being only an imitation of its real-world analogue: "Nevertheless [...] when such research is conducted in sensitive ways that capture features of "mundane" realism, the results can have considerable generalizability" (p. 206f.) Anybody who is familiar with controversies on theory of science will recognize that such a statement is mainly smart rhetoric.

The conclusion is that the lesson to be drawn from The Lucifer Effect must be mainly the need to mistrust and challenge so called scientism in general and social psychology in particular. The need to distrust authority in general was already a well-known tenet regarding politics, business, and many forms of religion. The book thrives by sharing the prestige of science, but both science and its prestigious practitioners should be mistrusted as much as politicians and businessmen whenever their foundations are divorced from broader psychological science, philosophy, and theology. This book is a captivating and psychically numbing, excellently designed rhetorical artwork. It overwhelms the reader and this explains its marketing success as well as my merciful evaluation. As design draped in cognition it has the same pretensions as science and aesthetics of being substitute for both philosophy and religion..

And if anybody dislikes the ultimate reference to philosophy and religion I would like to adduce the epochal work by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America that deals with the core of democracy. In a masterly chapter with the title What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear, Tocqueville concludes his analysis in a previous chapter by showing how blind obedience, which is one main concept in Zimbardo's thesis, arises out of the shortcomings of a misunderstood democracy. And this very same same blind obedience seems to be the very same phenomenon of political correctness mentioned above. It clearly escapes Zimbardo's implicit political base in critical theory, and it exposes the shortcomings of its social psychology.

(The text above is an edited selection out of the book review in the form of a longer essay published on my home page.)