Philip Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect

Why Good People Become Evil

1. Philip Zimbardo
The Lucifer Effect
How Good People Become Evil

3. M.C. Escher
Angels and Demons
•Uses this art work as a symbol for how
good and evil are aspects of human
nature.
•Which one operates is a question of
perspective.
•The Lucifer Effect is about the
transformation of human psychology. How
is it that ‘good people’ do ‘evil’?

4. Key Ideas
•‘Good’ people are corrupted by powerful
situational forces.
•We must recognize what these forces are
and this is the best way to deal with ‘evil’.
•Evil: He offers a definition
•1: knowing better but doing worse.
•2: an intentional abuse of power resulting
in the demeaning of human dignity

5. •Evil is an idea that is relative to culture (its
content is determined by the time, nation
and culture in which it lives)
•One person’s terrorist is another person’s
hero.
•We are fascinated with evil because it is
so difficult to imagine and because it’s
about power. The other person has the
power to control, dominate and extinguish
life.

6. •Lucifer effect: is about the transformation of the
person towards ‘evil’
•The best way to deal with evil is to understand
the context that encourages its growth
•He begins with a case study he calls “digitally
documented depravity”, or the pictures taken
from the Abu Graib prison by army reservists
(weekend soldiers)
•(These prisoners were ‘detainees’ who were
waiting to be interrogated in the wake of 911)

9. Dispositional –Situational Analysis
•Dispositional: looks at the tendencies in
the person and want to designate them as
‘good’ or bad.
•Situational: looks at the situation and tries
to understand how the context makes the
person engage in ‘evil’ acts.
•These two approaches are what social
psychologists use to analyze.

10. A Third Possibility: Systemic
•He suggests that we should also look at the
system that creates conditions where ‘good’
people can turn ‘bad’.
•He is not concerned with ‘evil’ people but with
institutions/organizations that allow evil in people
to exist, grow, manifest.
•He compares this to the ‘barrel’ being rotten and
not just a few bad apples.
•He looks at political, economic and legal
influences for creating the system and the ‘bad
barrel makers’. (Uses Guantanamo as an
example.)

11. Stanley Milgram’s 1963 Study in
Blind Obedience to Authority
•An experimenter was played by a stern,
impassive biology teacher dressed in a
technician's coat, and the victim (learner) was
played by an trained actor. The participant and
the “learner” (actor) were told by the
experimenter that they would be participating in
an experiment helping his study of memory and
learning in different situations.

12. •Two slips of paper were then presented to the
participant and to the actor. The participant was
led to believe that one of the slips said "learner"
and the other said "teacher," and that he and the
actor had been given the slips randomly. In fact,
both slips said "teacher," but the actor claimed to
have the slip that read "learner," thus
guaranteeing that the participant would always
be the "teacher." At this point, the "teacher" and
"learner" were separated into different rooms
where they could communicate but not see each
other. In one version of the experiment, the
confederate was sure to mention to the
participant that he had a heart condition.

13. •The "teacher" was given a 45-volt electric shock from
the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock
that the "learner" would supposedly receive during the
experiment. The "teacher" was then given a list of word
pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher
began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner.
The teacher would then read the first word of each pair
and read four possible answers. The learner would press
a button to indicate his response. If the answer was
incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the
learner, with the voltage increasing for each wrong
answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word
pair.

14. •The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the
learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there
were no shocks. After the confederate was separated
from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder
integrated with the electro-shock generator, which
played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a
number of voltage level increases, the actor started to
bang on the wall that separated him from the subject.
After several times banging on the wall and complaining
about his heart condition, all responses by the learner
would cease.

15. •At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop
the experiment and check on the learner. Some test
subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the
purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being
assured that they would not be held responsible. A few
subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs
of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain
coming from the learner.
•If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the
experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods
by the experimenter, in this order:
•Please continue.
•The experiment requires that you continue.
•It is absolutely essential that you continue.
•You have no other choice, you must go on.

16. •If the subject still wished to stop after all
four successive verbal prods, the
experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was
halted after the subject had given the
maximum 450-volt shock three times in
succession. This experiment could be
seen to raise some ethical issues as the
experimenter did not truthfully tell the
people involved what the real test was for
(a standard practice in psychological tests
today).

17. Results
•1000 ordinary people in 16 different studies, not
only Yale students.
• 2/3 (65%) go all the way to 450! (at 375, the
learner screams in terror and becomes silent)
•Psychiatrists predicted that only 1% would go all
the way. They were wrong and this is an
example of dispositional analysis error
(psychiatrists are trained to think that it’s all in
your head) and the fundamental attribution
error (when you ignore the situation in favour of
the person)

18. • Stanley Milgram experience: a study in blind
obedience to authority and not knowing how to
exit a bad situation.
•Under the most extreme circumstances, only
about 10% resist.
•Many criticized and said that the results came
because people didn’t believe the subject was
not really being shocked. They also criticized
the study saying that women would not have
acted this way. And so….

19. •Some psychologists repeated a study with a
puppy, (who obviously can’t be a confederate)
•twenty men and twenty women. The goal was to
condition the puppy to stand in a certain part of
a cage and when it didn’t obey, it was
administered a low level shock. How many do
you think actually shocked the puppy and went
all the way to the maximum voltage?

20. •50% of the men and 100% of the women.
Does that mean women are more evil than
men? 1971: women were more
concerned about grades and being
obedient than today. This study was
never published because too many people
reacted adversely.

21. So what does this prove?
•Conclusion: situational power affects all of us.
•All research is artificial. What is the external validity of
this study?
•He reminds of the jungle of Guyana and Rev. Jim Jones
where over 921 people committed mass suicide with
kool aid laced with cyanide.
•This is a recipe for how anyone can control a group.
•This process begin with ideology. All evil begins with a
big lie. Hitler: “I am doing the Lord’s work.” Begins with
a small first step that seems insignificant and then ask
for increasingly larger actions.

22. •We teach our kids to respect authority but we
don’t teach them enough for how to question it.
•Verbal dissent (But I’m not a bad person)
•Makes exiting difficult (compares it to date rape)
•Recalls Golding’s Lord of the Flies…power of
anonymity that disinhibits inhibitions.
•Make the situation the controlling factor and now
we’re set up for evil!

23. •America’s first terrorists: the KKK! (Used anonymity to
promote fear and terror not only among blacks but
Catholics and Jews through out the south.)
• Go into the real world: Warriors who change their
appearance before they go to war…this makes a
difference in how they treat their victims.
• He examined different cultures. 15 where they changed
their appearance (paint faces, disguises and masks) and
8 where they didn’t. In the cultures where they changed
their appearance, the soldiers were able to kill, torture
and mutilate. If they don’t change their appearance they
do nothing. (Culture has wisdom.) Military uniforms are
designed to make us act in a uniform way…against the
law to wear your uniform after war…killing must be
specific to a situation that the army\government can
control.

24. Power of prejudice and stereotypes
•He did another study with college students:
“they students from the other school are here…
they seem nice, they seem like animals”
•10 ten trials to give shocks…those who heard
the dehumanizing remarks shocked more,
longer and harder
•Stereotyping and prejudice allows us to suspend
our morality and coast along with the actions of
the group or the system.

25. Stanford Prison Experiment
•Milgram’s study was about one person responding to
another. This study examines how we respond to
institutions more than the psychology of prisoners.
(Good apples going into a bad barrel.) Personal
identities were erased, nice kids became brutal guards
and the illusion became the reality. Many subjects
developed extreme stress reactions and had to be
released but no one actually quit the experiment. Many
criticize the study for having violated ethical guidelines.
It was meant to last two weeks but was ended after six
days. He did not allow physical violence but allowed
psychological violence.
•http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=3487

26. •He is convinced that good and evil are not
intrinsic to human nature. We can all be Mother
Theresa and Sadaam Hussein. The best way to
combat evil is to be aware of the system that
creates it.
•You can visit his web site at
http://lucifereffect.com/ for more information
about the book and his ideas, especially about
resisting influence and heroism.