The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

In his preface, Philip Zimbardo stated that he didn’t want to write a book after his Stanford Prison experiment ended because he didn’t want to relive the negative emotions that the experiment caused. He agreed to write a book only after the nefarious events in the Abu Ghraib prison and being an expert witness for one of the Abu Ghraib guards. He didn’t want to write it, but he did. I didn’t want to read it, but I did.

I knew about the experiment. However, it has been so many years ago that I had forgotten where it happened and I knew none of the details. It happened when I was a graduate student at CMU. A professor may have talked about it. I only remembered that the experiment was important.

As I read the book, events that had happened in the education institution where I was either a student or a teacher flashed back. Some of the events that happened in the Stanford Prison experiment had happened in schools where I taught. Events then past by me without realizing what I had witnessed. Reading the Lucifer Effect opened my awareness: kind of late. Now I know what should have been stopped and what to avoid.

Philip wrote in detail about the behavior of an assistant that had been imprisoned and paroled prior to being made a part of the Stanford Prison experiment. I thought that he would have been sympathetic to the plight of the student prisoners. Empathy should have caused him to not do to them what was done to him [The Golden Rule]. That was not the case.

This is what I realized from reading what was written about the paroled prisoner that became the chairman of the Parole Board at the Stanford Prison. When roles are reversed after someone has had their self-esteem attacked by system authority figures, they will egregiously wage an attack on someone else’s self-esteem and then justify it with eloquent reasoning or defend themselves with anger. Knowing this is another reason why you should read The Lucifer Effect. You owe it to your students to understand how good people turn evil. The best way to do that is to read The Lucifer Effect.