The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

by Philip G. Zimbardo

status reversal the teacher generated the next day. Mrs. Elliott told the class she had erred. In fact, the opposite was true, she said; brown eyes were better than blue eyes! Here was the chance for the brown-eyed children, who had experienced the negative impact of being discriminated against, to show compassion now that they were on top of the heap. The new test scores reversed the superior performance of the haves and diminished the performance of the have-nots.

They dominated, they discriminated, and they abused their former blue-eyed abusers.4 Similarly, history is filled with accounts showing that many of those escaping religious persecution show intolerance of people of other religions once they are safe and secure in their new power domain.

Forgotten were the years of suffering he had endured as a brown-eyed inmate once he was granted the privileged position of seeing the world through the eyes of the all-powerful head of this Board. Carlo’s statement to his colleagues at the end of this meeting showed the agony and disgust his transformation had instilled in him. He had become the oppressor. Later that night, over dinner, he confided that he had been sickened by what he had heard himself say and had felt when he was cloaked in his new role.

Curiously, he does not demand that the Board act now to terminate his role as a reluctant student research volunteer. He doesn’t want any money, so why does he not simply say, “I quit this experiment. You must give me my clothes and belongings, and I am out of here!”

he stands firmly by his principles and obstinately in the strategy he has advanced. Nevertheless, he has become too embedded in his prisoner identity to do the macroanalysis that should tell him he has now been given the keys to freedom by insisting to the Parole Board that he must be allowed to quit here and now while he is physically removed from the prison venue.

5486 manages to antagonize Prescott as much as any other prisoner has. He answers immediately that he would not be willing to give up the pay he’s earned so far in exchange for parole.

In one sense, Sarge seems to be the most one-dimensional, mindlessly obedient prisoner of all, yet he is the most logical, thoughtful, and morally consistent prisoner of the group. It occurs to me that one problem this young man might have stems from his commitment to living by abstract principles and not knowing how to live effectively with other people or how to ask others for the support he needs, financial, personal, and emotional. He seems so tightly strung by this inner resolve and his outer military posturing that no one can really get access to his feelings. He may end up having a harder life than the rest of his fellows.

A month later, Carlo Prescott offered a tender personal declaration of the impact this experience had on him: “Whenever I came into the experiment, I invariably left with a feeling of depression—that’s exactly how authentic it was. The experiment stopped being an experiment when people began to react to various kinds of things that happened during the course of the experiment. I noted in prison, for example, that people who considered themselves guards had to conduct themselves in a certain way. They had to put across certain impressions, certain attitudes. Prisoners in other ways had their certain attitudes, certain impressions that they acted out—the same thing occurred here.

“ . . . I wasn’t surprised, nor was it a great pleasure to find my belief confirmed that ‘people become the role they enact’;

I realized then that I was as much a prisoner as they were. I was just a reaction to their feelings. They had more of a choice in their actions. I don’t think we did. We were both crushed by the situation of oppressiveness, but we guards had the illusion of freedom. I did not see that at the time, or else I would have quit. We all went in as slaves to the money. The prisoners soon became slaves to us; we were still slaves to the money. I realized later that we were all slaves to something in this environment.

In Guard Ceros’s final evaluation report, he offered a different take on the emerging sense of dehumanization by the guards of the prisoners: There were a few times when I had forgotten the prisoners were people, but I always caught myself, realized that they were people. I simply thought of them as ‘prisoners’ losing touch with their humanity. This happened for short periods of time, usually when I was giving orders to them. I am tired and disgusted at times, this is usually the state of my mind.

I was actually beginning to feel like a guard and had really thought I was incapable of this kind of behavior. I was surprised—no, I was dismayed—to find out that I could really be a—uh—that I could act in a manner so absolutely unaccustomed to anything I would really dream of doing. And while I was doing it I didn’t feel any regret, I didn’t feel any guilt. It was only afterwards, when I began to reflect on what I had done, that this behavior began to dawn on me and I realized that this was a part of me I had not noticed before.”8

Prisoner 416 when he arrived yesterday as a replacement prisoner for first-to-be-released prisoner Doug-8612. He could not believe what he was witnessing and wanted to quit the experiment immediately. However, he was told by his cellmates that he could not quit.

Clay-416 was more powerfully impacted by his first day as a prisoner in the Stanford County Jail than anyone else was, as he told us in this personal, yet depersonalized analysis: “I began to feel that I was losing my identity. The person I call ‘Clay,’ the person who put me in this place, the person who volunteered to go into this prison—’cause it was a prison to me, it still is a prison to me—I don’t look on it as an experiment or a simulation—it

I was ‘416.’ I was really my number, and 416 was going to have to decide what to do, and that was when I decided to fast. I decided to fast because that was the one reward the guards gave you. They always threatened they wouldn’t let you eat, but they had to give you eats. And so I stopped eating. Then I had a sort of power

Prisoner 1037 later said that the worst part of the experiment was the “time when the guards gave me the feeling that they were expressing their true inner feelings and not just the guard role they were playing.

Christina had worked with me earlier as a teaching assistant and a valuable research collaborator as well as an informal editor of several of my books.

Now he is forced to follow through on his priestly promise to give aid should anyone request his assistance. Sure enough, Father McDermott calls the mother of Hubbie-7258 and tells Mrs. Whittlow that her son needs legal representation if he wants to get out of the Stanford County Jail.

Heroism often requires social support. We typically celebrate heroic deeds of courageous individuals, but we do not do so if their actions have tangible immediate cost to the rest of us and we can’t understand their motives. Such heroic seeds of resistance are best sown if all members of a community share a willingness to suffer for common values and goals.

Clay-416, although he had a personal plan for effective resistance, he did not take time to share it with his cellmates or the other prisoners so that they could decide to join forces with him. Had he done so, his plan might have represented a unifying principle rather than being dismissed as a personal pathology. It would have become a collective challenge to the evil system rather than a dispositional quirk.

Because a lot of people said they were going to be hard and fast and strike and all this, but when it finally came around to somebody having the guts to do that, they went against him. They wanted their own petty little comforts rather than see him hold on to his integrity.

realized that everybody was so far into the whole thing that they were suffering and making others suffer as well. It

No matter how open, friendly and helpful I was with other prisoners I was still operating as an isolated, self-centered person, being rational rather than compassionate. I got along fine in my own detached way, but now I’m aware that frequently my actions hurt others. Instead of responding to their needs, I would assume that they were as detached as I and thereby rationalize my own selfish behavior.

When I looked through the observation point, I was absolutely stunned to see that their John Wayne was the “really nice guy” with whom I had chatted earlier. Only now, he was transformed into someone else. He not only moved differently, but he talked differently—with a Southern accent . . . . He was yelling and cursing at the prisoners as he made them go through “the count,” going out of his way to be rude and belligerent. It was an amazing transformation from the person I had just spoken to—a transformation that had taken place in minutes just by stepping over the line from the outside world into that prison yard.

Phil acknowledged what I was saying, apologized for his treatment of me, and realized what had been gradually happening to him and everyone else in the study: that they had all internalized a set of destructive prison values that distanced them from their own humanitarian values. And at that point, he owned up to his responsibility as creator of this prison and made the decision to call the experiment to a halt.

Given that they were all randomly assigned to play these contrasting roles, there were no inherent differences between the two categories. They all began the experience as seemingly good people.

They also knew that the prisoners had done nothing criminally wrong to deserve their lowly status. Yet, some guards have transformed into perpetrators of evil, and other guards have become passive contributors to the evil through their inaction. Still other normal, healthy young men as prisoners have broken down under the situational pressures, while the remaining surviving prisoners have become zombie-like followers.24

What does Guard Ceros have to say about his own behavior? His retrospective diary noted, “I decided to force feed him, but he wouldn’t eat. I let the food slide down his face. I didn’t believe it was me doing it. I hated myself for making him eat. I hated him for not eating. I hated the reality of human behavior.”2

The negative power on which I had been running for the past week, as superintendent of this mock prison, had blinded me to the reality of the destructive impact of the System that I was sustaining. Moreover, the myopic focus of a principal research investigator similarly distorted my judgment about the need to terminate the experiment much earlier,

The System includes the Situation, but it is more enduring, more widespread, involving extensive networks of people, their expectations, norms, policies, and, perhaps, laws. Over time, Systems come to have a historical foundation and sometimes also a political and economic power structure that governs and directs the behavior of many people within its sphere of influence.

It was surely my mistake to embrace the dual roles of researcher and superintendent because their different, sometimes conflicting, agendas created identity confusion in me. At the same time, those dual roles also compounded my power,

A person in the claws of the System just goes along, doing what emerges as the natural way to respond at that time in that place.

Geoff had done small favors for them, constantly distanced himself from the abusive actions of his night shift crewmates, and even stopped wearing his guard’s sunglasses and military shirt. He even told us later that he had thought about asking to become a prisoner because he hated to be part of a system that was grinding other people down so badly.

One mode of inaction that characterized the “good guards” was their reluctance to challenge the abusive actions of the “bad guards” on their shift. Not only did they never face up to them while on the Yard, but neither Geoff Landry nor Markus ever did so in private

What became evident is that the prisoners had come to perceive the guards as taller than they actually were, as though their guard power provided them with a two-inch shoe lift.

One psychological observation that I offered was about the lack of humor in our prison and the failure to use humor to defuse tension or even to bring some reality to an unreal situation. For example, guards who were not pleased with the extreme behavior of their shift mates could have made a joke at their expense in guard quarters,

The material conditions, like the guards, the cells, and such stuff, that didn’t matter to me—like when I was nude and in chains, that never bothered me. It was the head part, the psychological part that was the worst. Knowing that I couldn’t get out if I wanted . . . I didn’t like not being able to go to the bathroom when I wanted to . . . . It’s not having the choice that’s the tearing apart thing.”14

The experience of one full day as a prisoner had aroused sufficient anxiety to keep me away from the prison for the rest of the week. Even when I returned for the “debriefing” session, I was still feeling extremely anxious—I

Guard Varnish: “This experience was worthwhile for me, absolutely. The idea that two roughly identical groups of college students each in only a week’s time evolved into two totally disparate social groups with one group having and utilizing total power over the other to their detriment is chilling.

Guard John Landry: “After I talked to the other prisoners, they told me I was a good guard and thanks for being that way. I knew inside I was a shit. Curt [Banks] looked at me and I knew he knew. I knew also that while I was good and just to the prisoners, I failed myself. I let cruelty happen and did nothing except feel guilty and be a nice guy.

I felt as though I didn’t want to become part of the machine that beats down on other men and forces them to conform and continually harasses them. I almost wished that I was being harassed than having to be the harasser.”22

The guard role promotes sadism. The prisoner role promotes confusion and shame. Anybody can be a guard. It’s harder to be on guard against the impulse to be sadistic. It’s a quiet rage, malevolence, you can keep down but there’s nowhere for it to go; it comes out sideways, sadistically.

I think you do have more control as a prisoner. Everybody needs to [experience being] a prisoner. There are real prisoners I have met in jail who are people of exceptional dignity, who did not put down the guards,

I realized that I was just as much a prisoner as they were. I was just a reaction to their feelings . . . . We were both crushed by the oppressiveness, but we, the guards, had an illusion of freedom. That’s just what it was, an illusion

I set my mouth rigidly into a semi scowl, determined to hold it there no matter what is said. At cell 3 I stop and setting my voice hard and low say to #5486, ‘What are you smiling at?’ ‘Nothing, Mr. Correctional Officer.’ ‘Well see that you don’t.’ As I walk off I feel stupid.”

The absolute cruelty of this event (Hellmann’s decision to leave 416 in the Hole all night) does not hit me until weeks later, but it must have hit Phil [Zimbardo] hard along with many other things at this point [that he decided to end the study].27

“The worst thing about the experiment was that so many people took me so seriously and that I made them enemies. My words affected them, [the prisoners] seemed to lose touch with the reality of the experiment.”31

Clay: “I do, I do know that you’re a nice guy. I don’t get bad—” Hellmann: “Then why do you hate me?” Clay: “Because I know what you can turn into.

here they’re supposed to be together as a unit in jail, but here they’re abusing each other because I requested them to and no one questioned my authority at all. And it really shocked me. [His eyes get teary.] Why didn’t people say something when I started to abuse people? I started to get so profane, and still, people didn’t say anything. Why?”

Perhaps we are born with a full range of capacities, each of which is activated and developed depending on the social and cultural circumstances that govern our lives.