The Lucifer Effect: Understanding 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.

full understanding of the dynamics of human behavior requires that we recognize the extent and limits of personal power, situational power, and systemic power.

Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds one’s thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see those others as enemies deserving of torment, torture, and annihilation. With this set of analytical tools at our disposal, we turn to reflect upon the causes of the horrendous abuses and torture of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison by the U.S.

In contrast to the “banality of evil,” which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the “banality of heroism,” which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Three psychological truths emerge from Escher’s image. 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.

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.”4

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity.

Upholding a Good–Evil dichotomy also takes “good people” off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating, sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. “It’s the way of the world, and there’s not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me.” An alternative conception treats evil in incrementalist terms, as something of which we are all capable, depending on circumstances.

In other words, my focus has widened considerably through a fuller appreciation of the ways in which situational conditions are created and shaped by higher-order factors—systems of power. Systems, not just dispositions and situations, must be taken into account in order to understand complex behavior patterns.

With public fear notched up and the enemy threat imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors.

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.

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds,”

What are other self-imposed prisons that limit our basic freedoms? Neurotic disorders, low self-esteem, shyness, prejudice, shame, and excessive fear of terrorism are just some of the chimeras that limit our potentiality for freedom and happiness, blinding our full appreciation of the world around us.21

Senseless, mindless arbitrary tasks are the necessary components of guard power.

Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.

Here is a simple instance of power determining language use, which, in turn, creates reality.

Like all other perpetrators of institutional abuse, I ascribe the problem of her son as dispositional, as his problem—as something wrong in him.

He was released for work duty to clean out the toilets with his bare hands

Moreover, their newly acquired status spilled over to enhance their cognitive functioning. When they were on top, the blue-eyes improved their daily math and spelling performances (statistically significant, as I documented with Elliott’s original class data). Just as dramatically, test performance of the “inferior” brown-eyed children deteriorated.

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.

‘people become the role they enact’;

Sometimes it takes time and distance to realize the value of life’s important lessons.

This intense, extended experience is enriching my appreciation of the complexity of human nature because just when you think you understand someone, you realize you know only the smallest slice of their inner nature derived from a limited set of personal or mediated contacts.

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. Systems are the engines that run situations that create behavioral contexts that influence the human action of those under their control. At some point, the System may become an autonomous entity, independent of those who initially started it or even of those in apparent authority within its power structure. Each System comes to develop a culture of its own, as many Systems collectively come to contribute to the culture of a society.

It is evident that one does not appreciate the power of Situations to transform one’s thinking, feeling, and action when caught in its grip. 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.

Humor breaks through the pretensions of person and place. However, in the past week there had been none to be found in this sad place.

“The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that’s why they broke down—just couldn’t stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this.”

These measures were the F-Scale of authoritarianism, the Machiavellian Scale of interpersonal manipulation strategies, and the Comrey Personality Scales.

This last unexpected finding reminds me of the phenomenon of “identification with the aggressor.” The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim7 used this term to characterize ways in which Nazi concentration camp prisoners internalized the power that was inherent in their oppressors (it was first used by Anna Freud). Bettelheim observed that some inmates acted like their Nazi guards, not only abusing other prisoners but even wearing bits of cast-off SS uniforms. Desperately hoping to survive a hostile, unpredictable existence, the victim senses what the aggressor wants and rather than opposing him, embraces his image and becomes what the aggressor is. The frightening power differential between powerful guards and powerless prisoners is psychologically minimized by such mental gymnastics.

Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man’s spirit than when we win his heart. —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

In my many years of experience teaching at a variety of universities, I have found that most students are not concerned with power issues because they have enough to get by in their world, where intelligence and hard work get them to their goals. 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. However, power itself becomes a goal for many because of all the resources at the disposal of the powerful. The former statesman Henry Kissinger described this lure as “the aphrodisiac of power.” That lure attracts beautiful young women to ugly, old, but powerful men.

The SPE, along with much other social science research (presented in chapters 12 and 13), reveals a message we do not want to accept: that most of us can undergo significant character transformations when we are caught up in the crucible of social forces.

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.

The genocide and atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and recently in Sudan’s Darfur region also provide strong evidence of people surrendering their humanity and compassion to social power and abstract ideologies of conquest and national security. Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us—under the right or wrong situational circumstances. 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. The primary simple lesson the Stanford Prison Experiment teaches is that situations matter. Social situations can have more profound effects on the behavior and mental functioning of individuals, groups, and national leaders than we might believe possible. Some situations can exert such powerful influence over us that we can be led to behave in ways we would not, could not, predict was possible in advance.16 Situational power is most salient in novel settings, those in which people cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavioral options.

Therefore, 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. We should yield to dispositional analyses (genes, personality traits, personal pathologies, and so on) only when the situationally based detective work fails to make sense of the puzzle. My colleague Lee Ross adds that such an approach invites us to practice “attributional charity.” That means we start not by blaming the actor for the deed but rather, being charitable, we first investigate the scene for situational determinants of the act.

Some rules are essential for the effective coordination of social behavior, such as audiences listening while performers speak, drivers stopping at red traffic lights, and people not cutting into queues. However, many rules are merely screens for dominance by those who make them or those charged with enforcing them.

People are less rational than they are adept at rationalizing—explaining away discrepancies between their private morality and actions contrary to it.

It is the meaning that people assign to various components of the situation that creates its social reality. Social reality is more than a situation’s physical features. It is the way actors view their situation, their current behavioral stage, which engages a variety of psychological processes.

beliefs create expectations, which in turn can gain strength when they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Their social construction of this new reality cemented them in the oppressive situation being created by the guards’ capricious and hostile actions. The prisoners themselves became their own guards.

Within some caring professions, such as clinical psychology, social work, and medicine, this process is called “detached concern.” The actor is put into the paradoxical position of having to dehumanize clients in order to better assist or cure them.

It started with the loss of freedom and extended to the loss of privacy and finally to the loss of personal identity. It separated inmates from their past, their community, and their families and substituted for their normal reality a current reality that forced them to live with other prisoners in an anonymous cell with virtually no personal space.

The most important lesson to be derived from the SPE is that Situations are created by Systems. Systems provide the institutional support, authority, and resources that allow Situations to operate as they

Ideology is a slogan or proposition that usually legitimizes whatever means are necessary to attain an ultimate goal.

Consider the possibility that each of us has the potential, or mental templates, to be saint or sinner, altruistic or selfish, gentle or cruel, submissive or dominant, sane or mad, good or evil. 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.

Memory enables us to profit from mistakes and build upon the known to create better futures.

Virtue, as Dante showed in the Inferno, is not simply refraining from sin; it requires action.

Was the pain endured by the participants in this experiment offset by the gain to science and society generated by the research? In other words, did the scientific ends justify the experimental means? While

Disagree with this method of ethical analysis, utilitarian