The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Zimbardo asserts that motives and needs that are generally positive can lead individuals astray when they are manipulated by social forces. The human need to belong, to be accepted by others, and for consistency between private attitudes and public behavior can pervert individuals’ thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions. Peer pressure is a strong social force, but “[t]here is no peer-pressure power without that push from self-pressure for Them to want You” (259). As British scholar C.S. Lewis explains, this pressure can impede initiative and hinder personal autonomy. The result is that social groups indirectly influence individuals to model the group’s behavior. Concurrently, self-serving biases distance individuals from this reality and make them vulnerable to prevent them from working to avoid this behavior “situational forces” (262).

Zimbardo explains several experiments that illustrate this premise. Firstly, he describes an experiment by social psychologist Muzafer Sherif, which placed subjects in a dark room with one stationary spotlight. The light appeared to move spontaneously, because in the dark room the subject has no frame of reference. Each subject was asked individually to judge the light’s movement, and the range described was wide. When Sherif then placed the individuals with other participants, each group created a standard range. When Sherif subsequently returned the subjects to the room individually, their judgments continued to resemble their group’s established range. Sherif concludes that individuals’ need for social unanimity is a strong situational force.

As well, the social psychologist Solomon Asch attempted to challenge Sherif’s results when he created a less ambiguous situation for his subjects, but his experiment produced similar results. Asch found that the only way to promote independence was to pair subjects with a partner whose views were in line with their own. With someone buttressing subjects’ assertions, they were more likely to maintain them. Corresponding with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging shows that “resistance creates an emotional burden for those who maintain their independence—autonomy comes at a psychic cost” (265). Zimbardo interprets these findings, explaining that group consensus impacts perceptions of truth. Awareness of social pressure is critical if groups want to avoid conforming according to the “mentality of the herd” (265).

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram continues this line of research with his famous shock experiment. Milgram explains that he “was trying to think of a way to make Asch’s conformity experiment more humanly significant” (266). Over the course of a year, Milgram carried out 19 different variations of the same experiment: he paired subjects with an undercover actor, then had them draw lots to decide which is the “learner” and which is the “teacher.” The draw was fixed so that subjects were always teachers. The learner was then escorted into another room and had electrodes attached to his arms. Milgram and the teacher then entered a separate room with an electric shock generator.

Milgram told the subject to administer a shock every time the “learner” made a mistake and to increase the voltage with every wrong answer. The “learner” did not actually experience shocks, but as the experiment progresses, the “learner” made increasingly audible indications that the shocks were causing them pain. If the subject hesitated or refused to administer a shock, Milgram prodded them to continue administering shocks. Despite wails of agony and the belief they may have killed the “learner,” two of every three subjects continued administering shocks to the maximum level of 450 volts. When Milgram assured subjects that he would take responsibility for negative consequences, removing this burden, everyone continued to the maximum level of 450 volts. Milgram achieved similar results in all 19 versions of the experiment, regardless of adjustments to variables—thus, revealing “the extreme pliability of human nature: almost everyone could be totally obedient or almost everyone could resist authority pressures” (272).

The Milgram experiment offers 10 methods to ensure social conformity and compliance: one, prearranging a contractual obligation; two, assigning actors meaningful roles; three, concocting rules that make sense before their imposition, but can be applied arbitrarily to justify compliance; four, altering the semantics of the act, actor, and action; five, removing responsibility for negative consequences from the actor; six, progressing from small, easy directives, to larger and more meaningful ones; seven, increasing such directives gradually; eight, gradually altering the nature of the authority figure; nine, imputing high exit costs and making exit difficult; and ten, offering an ideology to justify the use of any means to achieve the ultimate goal.

Zimbardo notes that nations rely on ideology (often in the form of national security threats) to obtain social obedience, and that individuals can avoid this trap by asserting personal authority and responsibility over their own actions.

Milgram’s experiment has been replicated in a wide variety of situations, all of which produce similar results in the domains of doctors and nurses, commercial pilots and co-pilots, administrative obedience to authority, sexual obedience to authority, and even in classroom experiments in which teachers created Nazi-like tendencies in hundreds of their students. Other experiments have influenced elementary school students to exercise real prejudices based on false eye color assertions, and other experiments have convinced college students to endorse the extermination of undesirables who were determined “by some authorities to be less fit to live than they were” (285).

Zimbardo points out that many Nazi officers who carried out the most brutal acts against their fellow countrymen were normal working-class individuals who, absent the powerful systemic and situational forces influencing them, would have been upstanding and moral citizens. The psychologist Ervin Staub states that “[b]eing part of a system shapes views, rewards adherence to dominant views, and makes deviation psychologically demanding and difficult” (286). Of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who arranged the murder of millions of Jews, the social philosopher Hannah Arendt states:

‘The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied … that this new type of criminal … commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel that he is doing wrong’ (288).

Zimbardo draws parallels to torturers and suicide bombers, who are not sadists, but individuals selected from normal citizenry and conditioned to commit such acts. Situational and systemic factors create monsters of these people, not individual tendencies to commit evil acts.

Zimbardo concludes this analysis by stating that the next step is to look beyond the phenomenon of conformity to uncover “conditions that make bystanders to evil become passive observers” (295). To Zimbardo, evil cannot exist with this silence and absence of action.