You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

Decades later, Zimbardo would reject the U.S. government’s claims about the sadism displayed at the Abu Ghraib prison as being the result of the behavior of a few bad apples. The government was committing the fundamental attribution error, ignoring the power of the situation, turning the perpetrators into easy-to-dismiss characters. Although he doesn’t absolve those who tortured and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo suggests whenever people are put into a situation like the one he created in his experiment, the same results will unfold, as they did in 2004 in the Baghdad Correctional Facility and as they have in other prisons throughout history. People are not good at heart, Zimbardo says, but because their environment encourages it. Anyone, he believes, is capable of becoming a monster if given the power and opportunity.