The Lucifer Effect: History
I'm almost finished reading the book, The Lucifer Effect. I've realized that this book is just too pivotal for a review to sufficiently capture what I got from it, so I'm going to split this into multiple entries. For now, I want to write a bit about the history of how this book came about.

This is a book about evil. That's a word that is almost cliche and meaningless now, often associated with simplistic philosophies and ideologies. Popular culture has toyed with the idea in countless ways, and the neoconservatives that have been influencing or outright controlling the American government for the past few decades base their entire political philosophy on it.

But it's an important concept, one that needs to be taken seriously and addressed just as seriously. It's an idea that needs to be reclaimed from Bush and the fundamentalist Christians. It needs to be specifically defined, demonstrated in controlled settings, and understood scientifically. That's what Philip Zimbardo set out to do when he created the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE for short) in the 70's. He was able to reproduce the conditions that turn people evil, but he shocked the world and even himself by how quickly it happened, and how powerful it was when it did.

It freaked him out so much that, although he started writing a book on it back then, he couldn't follow through with it until only a couple years ago. After testifying as an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trials, he decided it was time to write the book.

He has so much more perspective to offer on the subject now because he's done a lot of research in the past few decades to help him understand what the hell happened in the SPE. There's also been a lot of other research that was inspired by the SPE, most notably the work of his high school friend and colleague, Stanley Milgram. So now instead of writing a book about just the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo was able to write a book about the psychology of evil in general. It's fascinating, and sometimes outright creepy, but it's vital to understand.

Zimbardo also found himself and his work going through some transitions as a result of the SPE. The SPE raises a lot of big questions, many of which are outside the scope of social psychology. It raises philosophical questions about the nature of evil. It raises political questions about how to organize people so as to bring out the best in people rather than the worst. Then once some of these questions are answered, the next logical step is to work to make these changes happen. So he found himself going from social psychologist to investigative reporter to political activist. This book walks the reader through each of these phases. It starts off as a psychology book and ends as a political book.