There are a lot of concepts used in The Lucifer Effect, many of which are traditional words which bring with them a lot of connotations and baggage, so it's important that he defines them precisely.

Evil - Intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others--or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf.

He talks a lot about "the Person in the Situation." Those are the two factors that will determine their behavior. Although the Situation will better predict the majority's behavior, neither one of them in isolation will give you a reliable picture. So, later in the book, he defines Person, Situation, and System.

Person - An actor on the stage of life whose behavioral freedom is informed by his or her makeup--genetic, biological, physical, and psychological.

Situation - The behavioral context that has the power, through its reward and normative functions, to give meaning and identity to the actor's roles and status.

System - The agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence.

In the last chapter, he discusses heroism, and expands it from its common concept of just people who risk their lives to save other lives. But older dictionaries have a wider definition of it, which Zimbardo tries to emphasize, encompassing "courage, bravery, fortitude, intrepidity, gallantry, and valor."

Heroism - A contempt of danger, not from ignorance or inconsiderate levity, but from a noble devotion to some great cause, and a just confidence of being able to meet danger in the spirit of such a cause. The danger may be immediately life threatening, or it may be insidious.

He emphasizes that heroism is culture-specific--what one culture calls heroic, another may call evil. But he spells out 12 kinds of heroism that we know of in our culture: military and other duty-bound physical-risk heros, civil heroes, non-duty-bound physical-risk heros, religious figures, politico-religious figures, martyrs, political or military leaders, adventurer/explorer/discoverer, scientific (discovery) heroes, good samaritan, odds beater/underdog, bureaucracy heroes, and whistle-blowers.

He also spells out ten ways we can resist the impact of undesirable social influnces and at the same time promoting personal resilience and civic virtue, and foster heroism in ourselves.

The Lucifer Effect is a book about the psychology of evil, but not the kind of evil you'll find in religious books or neoconservative propaganda. The basis for most of these is what the author, Philip Zimbardo, calls "dispositional evil," that there are good people and evil people--good people do good things and evil people do evil things.

But every single one of us has a potential Mother Teresa and a potential Hitler within us, and what brings out these traits are situations. We're a product not only of our upbringing, education, and values, but much more the environment we find ourselves in at any given time. This is what he calls "situational evil."

This flies in the face of everything we're taught about good vs. evil, from popular culture, religion, politicians, and education. People are used to a very simplistic idea that someone is either good or evil. Yet, all evidence defies this. Look at history. Lynch mobs, the holocaust, Salem witch trials, etc. There are so many cases of "good, normal people" doing horrific things when they find themselves in a horrific context.

And it has been demonstrated time and again by social psychologists. It never ceased to astonish, even frighten them, how easy and quick it was to reproduce these evil situations. How easy it is to make good people do some of the most horrific things. The most pivotal of these is the Stanford Prison Experiment, but The Lucifer Effect discusses several others. In every single case, the evil was created practically instantaneously, and so pervasively that sometimes the psychologists themselves got sucked into it, as Zimbardo believes he was with the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It's creepy, but that much more vital that it be understood. Because now we have the scientific evidence to understand evil, and we know that it's mostly situational rather than dispositional, so we know that it's much easier to prevent. We can't control peoples' genetics or even their upbringing. Many Christians try to control evil by controlling people's sexual behaviors, the media they consume, how they spend their free time, even the language they use and the clothes they wear. But all that's really necessary is to prevent evil situations from arising in the first place.

This is particularly convenient since the worst of these situations tend to arise from within the State itself, and many of the rest arise within corporations and other institutions. Whenever there's a large control structure, and significant power dynamics. These institutions operate by means of policy, so it's just a matter of changing the policies. That's why it can get so political.

Zimbardo repeatedly makes it clear that "psychology is not excusiology." In other words, understanding the power of situations to bring out the worst in people does not mean that personal responsibility isn't important. In fact, it's more important than ever.

There's a positive side to this. If evil is situational, then therefore its contrast, heroism, is also situational. Heroes aren't born; they're made. Situations bring them out in people. Zimbardo explores this in depth at the end of the book, but it's very hard to study, and not very well understood. What is known is that heroes don't conform easily, aren't quick to trust authority, have a unique ability to retain their moral compass in trying situations, and are less afraid of personal consequences in order to do the right thing. But often, these traits don't come out until they're put into an extreme situations. It's possible to consciously foster these traits, so that when evil situations do arise, we'll be ready for them, and we'll be more inclined to do the right thing.

The Lucifer Effect was written by Philip Zimbardo, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. It's a book about evil, not about evil people, but evil situations. Its subtitle is Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

It's broken down into four sections. The first is about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It spells out, in more detail than ever, what exactly happened in this experiment. It was a two week experiment that was cut short to only a week. He breaks that week down, day by day. You can watch clearly how things went, in a matter of a day or two, from a game of cops and robbers into a serious, pervasive situation of psychological abuse, which caused two prisoners to become hysterical. Zimbardo tells the tale so clearly that it's easy to imagine it, and picture yourself in that situation, and ask yourself how you'd behave in such a situation.

Second, he talks a lot about what has happened in social psychology after this pivotal experiment, some of his own research that it inspired and influenced, some reproductions of this experiment in other cultures, and some experiments that others did that demonstrated the power of situational evil in other ways. He talks about personality measures like the F-Scale, Machiavellian Scale, and the Comrey Personality Scales. He talks about cognitive dissonance, deindividuation, dehumanization, social approval, obedience, and conformity. He explains Milgram's experiment on blind obedience to authority, the "strip search scams" that happened a few years ago, teacher Ron Jones' duplication of Nazi Germany at Palo Alto High School called "The Third Wave," and much, much more, absolutely fascinating research that has been done in this field.

Third, he spells out the Abu Graib tortures that happened in the American-run Iraqi prison. He considers it a real world duplication of the Stanford Prison Experiment. He describes the parallels between these two, and they are indeed very eerily similar. When Zimbardo saw the parallels, he really felt like he had something to contribute to the trials, and wanted in. He was able to serve as an expert witness, mostly because he wanted to learn the inside details. In this way, he became a sort of investigative reporter, thoroughly researching a political situation so as to tell the world about it. Then he becomes a political activist, implicating the system that made these tortures possible. He goes through all the players, right up to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and shows how they all had a hand in Abu Graib.

Fourth, he discusses heroism, what it is, the different types that exist in our culture, and how to foster it in oneself.

This is definitely one of the best books I've ever read. It talks about a lot of things I already knew about, but didn't understand completely, nor did I grasp their full implications.

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.