The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

To fully understand human behavior and prevent undesirable behavior, one must understand the limits of personal power, situational power, and systemic power. Our society currently adopts a medical model approach to curing individual wrongs—treating the perpetrator as if they acted in a vacuum, free of situational and systemic influences. Zimbardo advocates shifting to a public health style approach, treating the problems of undesirable behavior by understanding the situations which cause individual actors to perpetrate offenses and addressing the system in which such offenses are committed. Zimbardo clarifies “that attempting to understand the situational and systemic contributions to any individual’s behavior does not excuse the person or absolve him or her from responsibility in engaging in immoral, illegal, or evil deeds” (xi).

Zimbardo spent his youth in poverty, in New York City’s South Bronx. He reflects that some good kids “ended up doing some really bad things” (xi). During gang initiations, kids stole and fought, but never considered those actions bad: “It was merely obeying the group leader and conforming to the norms of the gang” (xi). In the ghetto, people like landlords and police held systemic power, and they wielded their power in authoritarian fashion.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, discussed in the book’s first half, illustrates that situational variables can dominate an individual and eliminate their will to resist. Psychological processes such as deindividuation, obedience to authority, passivity, self-justification, and rationalization can induce good people to perpetuate evil. Thus, situational factors and systemic factors must be assessed and altered to prevent placing individuals in situations in which they cannot refrain from committing atrocities. 

The Lucifer Effect attempts to understand the processes that cause good people to commit evil acts. Zimbardo defines evil:

Evil consists in 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 (5).

People’s egocentric biases give them the illusion they are special. Such biases are more commonly present in American and Western European cultures, which foster independent orientations. They occur less frequently in collectivist-oriented societies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Most people know themselves only in familiar settings. When those settings change, people are often surprised to find that their morals change also.

The notion that good people and bad people are inherently different is comforting. It has a binary logic that reassures people that because they have not committed evil acts, they are good and different than those who do commit evil acts. It also frees “good people” from responsibility for any contribution they might make to “the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence” (6-7). Everyone has the potential to commit evil.

Zimbardo develops his theory of evil according to the dispositional and situational theories of behavior. Dispositional theory explains human behavior at the level of an individual social actor. Situational theory posits that human behavior depends on a set of circumstances: “Social psychologists ask: To what extent can an individual’s actions be traced to factors outside the actor, to situational variables and environmental processes unique to a given setting?” (8). Most people weigh too heavily dispositional qualities, and they overly reduce the weight of situational qualities when they evaluate the causes of others’ behavior. Dispositional and situational theories are alternative perspectives that produce differing methods of addressing personal and societal issues.

An early source of the use of dispositional theory in social policy is the Malleus Maleficarum, known colloquially as “The Witches’ Hammer”—the bible of the Inquisition. Bad acts were attributed to individual actors, labeled witches, and the solution was to eliminate all individual bad actors—witches: “This kind of simplistic reduction of the complex issues regarding evil fueled the fires of the Inquisition […] [and] generated evil on a grander scale than the world had ever seen before” (9).

If situations shape individuals’ actions, it is also true that “situational conditions are created and shaped by higher-order factors—systems of power” (9-10). Systems must be evaluated to understand complex behavior patterns. The “power elite” operate behind the scenes to arrange the conditions of life and institutional settings in which most people exist. Zimbardo quotes sociologist C. Wright Mills, who explains that the power elite are men in power; these men often lead corporations, the government, and the military. Their decisions to act as well as their decisions not to act impact society in significant ways.

Zimbardo adds that the military-corporate-religious complex puts a social hierarchy in place, one that controls the resources and quality of life for modern Americans. This top-down communication can utilize propaganda to engender hatred and dehumanize perceptions of the other. In its most extreme forms, it has caused genocide on countless occasions in modern history.

In the past century, more than 50 million people have been murdered because soldiers and civilians carried out government orders. In Rwanda, for example, Hutus slaughtered friends and neighbors on command, murdering at least 800,000 people in approximately three months. Perpetrators used rape to terrorize and spiritually annihilate women. At least 200,000 women were raped during this atrocity. Mass rape ensured that the scars of the genocide would persist due to the spread of AIDS, which continues to wreak havoc in Rwanda. Nicole Bergevin, the lawyer for a prominent Hutu offender in her genocide trial, states:

‘When you do murder trials, you realize that we are all susceptible, and you wouldn’t even dream you would ever commit this act. But you come to understand that everyone is [susceptible]. It could happen to me, it could happen to my daughter. It could happen to you’ (14-15).

As well, over several months in 1937, Japanese soldiers murdered between 260,000 and 350,000 Chinese civilians. The soldiers used men for bayonet practice and held decapitation contests. They also raped between 20,000 and 80,000 women, many of whom were also disemboweled, had their breasts sliced off, were forced into incestuous acts, and were nailed to walls alive. Similar acts of torture, rape, and murder were perpetuated by British troops during the US Revolutionary War, by the Soviet Red Army in Berlin during World War II, and by Americans against Vietnamese and Cambodians during 1968’s My Lai massacre.

Zimbardo explains his theory of evil with an analogy:

We can assume that most people, most of the time, are moral creatures. But imagine that this morality is like a gearshift that at times gets pushed into neutral. When that happens, morality is disengaged. If the car happens to be on an incline, car and driver move precipitously downhill. It is then the nature of the circumstances that determines outcomes, not the driver’s skills or intentions (17).

This theory has been tested in social experiments in which participants were asked to give electric shocks to subjects responding incorrectly to prompts. Participants repeatedly administered higher voltage and more frequent shocks to subjects they had been conditioned to view negatively, and lower voltage and less frequent shocks to subjects they had been conditioned to view positively.

In May 2004, images surfaced of American soldiers engaging in horrific torture against civilians they were guarding at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The images shocked civilian viewers, but a young soldier who committed the abuse described it as “just fun and games” (19). Zimbardo wonders “what circumstances in that prison cell block could have tipped the balance and led even good soldiers to do such bad things” (19).

In 1971, Zimbardo conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment, which he details in subsequent chapters. Zimbardo, who also worked as a psychologist to resolve the abuses at Abu Ghraib, notes that his Stanford Prison Experiment participants could have been interchangeable with the guards at Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo hopes that “by examining and understanding the causes of such evil [we] might […] be able to change it, to contain it, to transform it through wise decisions and innovative communal action” (20). He aims to critique the command structure of the US military, the CIA, and the US government “for their combined complicity in creating a dysfunctional system that spawned the torture and abuses of Abu Ghraib” (21).