The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil

by Philip G. Zimbardo

A large body of evidence in social psychology supports the concept that situational power triumphs over individual power in given contexts. I

First, the world is filled with both good and evil—was, is, will always be. Second, the barrier between good and evil is permeable and nebulous. And third, it is possible for angels to become devils and, perhaps more difficult to conceive, for devils to become angels.

By making people focus only on oneself in this way, Satan and his followers turn their eyes away from the harmony of love that unites all living creatures.

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. In short, it is “knowing better but doing worse.”

Such egocentric biases are more commonly found in societies that foster independent orientations, such as Euro-American cultures, and less so in collectivist-oriented societies, such as in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.5

In short, we can learn to become good or evil regardless of our genetic inheritance, personality, or family legacy.6

Most of us have a tendency both to overestimate the importance of dispositional qualities and to underestimate the importance of situational qualities when trying to understand the causes of other people’s behavior.

The military-corporate-religious complex is the ultimate megasystem controlling much of the resources and quality of life of many Americans today.

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.

this experiment has emerged as a powerful illustration of the potentially toxic impact of bad systems and bad situations in making good people behave in pathological ways that are alien to their nature.

Power is a concern when people either have a lot of it and need to maintain it or when they have not much power and want to get more.

Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in “total situations” that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.15

Paradoxically, by creating this myth of our invulnerability to situational forces, we set ourselves up for a fall by not being sufficiently vigilant to situational forces.

We are best able to avoid, prevent, challenge, and change such negative situational forces only by recognizing their potential power to “infect us,” as it has others who were similarly situated.

That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather, it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots—of Them but not Us.

Situational power is most salient in novel settings, those in which people cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavioral options.

whenever we are trying to understand the cause of any puzzling, unusual behavior, our own or that of others, we should start out with a situational analysis.

many rules are merely screens for dominance by those who make them or those charged with enforcing them.

The ego-defense mechanism of compartmentalization allows us to mentally bind conflicting aspects of our beliefs and experiences into separate chambers that prevent interpretation or cross talk.

When people feel anonymous in a situation, as if no one is aware of their true identity (and thus that no one probably cares), they can more easily be induced to behave in antisocial ways.

Dissonance is a state of tension that can powerfully motivate change either in one’s public behavior or in one’s private views in efforts to reduce the dissonance.

humanized relationships are “I–Thou,” while dehumanized relationships are “I–It.”

Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, that generation’s intellectual acid guru, offered a triple prescription for young people everywhere: “tune out” of traditional society; “turn on” to mind-altering drugs; and “tune in” to one’s inner nature.

most important lesson to be derived from the SPE is that Situations are created by Systems.

It provides the “higher authority” that gives validation to playing new roles, following new rules, and taking actions that would ordinarily be constrained by preexisting laws, norms, morals, and ethics. Such validation usually comes cloaked in the mantle of ideology.

powerful force in transforming human behavior, pushing people across the boundary between good and evil, comes from the basic desire to be “in” and not “out.”

Most of us construct self-enhancing, self-serving, egocentric biases that make us feel special—never ordinary, and certainly “above average.”

That statistically unreasonable belief (since most of us share it) makes you even more vulnerable to situational forces precisely because you underestimate their power as you overestimate yours.

It is only through recognizing that we are all subject to the same dynamic forces in the human condition, that humility takes precedence over unfounded pride, that we can begin to acknowledge our vulnerability to situational forces.

other people’s views, when crystallized into a group consensus, can actually affect how we perceive important aspects of the external world, thus calling into question the nature of truth itself.

by becoming aware of our vulnerability to social pressure that we can begin to build resistance to conformity when it is not in our best interest to yield to the mentality of the herd.

A good way to avoid crimes of obedience is to assert one’s personal authority and always take full responsibility for one’s actions.23

The more verbally fluent, intelligent students lost their positions of prominence as the less verbal, more physically assertive ones took over.

“Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.

“People desire death when two fundamental needs are frustrated to the point of extinction,” according to the psychologist Thomas Joiner in his treatise Why People Die by Suicide. The first need is one we have pointed to as central to conformity and social power, the need to belong with or connect to others. The second need is the need to feel effective with or to influence others.

What social psychology has given to an understanding of human nature is the discovery that forces larger than ourselves determine our mental life and our actions—chief among these forces [is] the power of the social situation.

anything, or any situation, that makes people feel anonymous, as though no one knows who they are or cares to know, reduces their sense of personal accountability, thereby creating the potential for evil action.

Environmental conditions contribute to making some members of society feel that they are anonymous, that no one in the dominant community knows who they are, that no one recognizes their individuality and thus their humanity.

Deindividuation creates a unique psychological state in which behavior comes under the control of immediate situational demands and biological, hormonal urges. Action replaces thought, seeking immediate pleasure dominates delaying gratification, and mindfully restrained decisions give way to mindless emotional responses.

Want help? Ask for it. Chances are good that you will get it, even from allegedly callous New Yorkers or other large-city folks.

The lesson from this research is to not ask who does or does not help but rather what the social and psychological features of that situation were when trying to understand situations in which people fail to help those in distress.30

Nations put them into practice not so much out of charitable goodwill but to ensure the decent treatment of their own soldiers should they be captured as prisoners of war.

Groups need effective task leaders more than they do good social-emotional ones in situations that are ambiguous, that involve shifting demands, and that lack explicit objectives—a

The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) identifies three aspects of a person’s relationship with a specific work setting: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and personal efficacy.