The Lucifer Effect Quotes

“our extraordinary ability to use language and symbols enables us to communicate with others personally, abstractly, over time and place. Language provides the foundation for history, planning, and social control. However, with language come rumors, lies, propaganda, stereotypes, and coercive rules. Our remarkable creative genius leads to great literature, drama, music, science, and inventions like the computer and the Internet. Yet that same creativity can be perverted into inventing torture chambers and torture tactics, into paranoid ideologies and the Nazis’ efficient system of mass murder. Any one of our special attributes contains the possibility of its opposite negative, as in the dichotomies of love–hate; pride–arrogance; self-esteem–self-loathing.2”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“No one played devil’s advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy’s “disastrous” decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Time and oppression are the fathers of rebellious invention.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“The ideal of the military hero is clearly echoed in other contexts, and it includes those who routinely risk their health and lives in the line of duty, such as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“learned helplessness.”1 (Learned helplessness is the experience of passive resignation and depression following recurring failure or punishment, especially when it seems arbitrary and not contingent upon one’s actions.)”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil

“There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” to alter the last phrase to “but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Added to my distress was the realization that many of the “independent” investigative reports clearly laid the blame for the abuses at the feet of senior officers”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Fear is the State’s psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“even psychologists are people, subject to the same dynamic processes at a personal level that they study at a professional level.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“يمكن للسجناء -كما يحدث في السجون الحقيقية- أن يُظهِروا إبداعاً لافتاً في صنع الأسلحة من أي شيءٍ تقريباً وتصميم خطط هروبٍ مُبتكرة، الوقت والقَمع هما أَبَوَا ابتكارات التمرّد.”
― فيليب زيمباردو, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“La protesta ciudadana exige cambios en el sistema. Si los cambios necesarios se hacen con astucia se puede evitar la desobediencia y la rebelión abierta. Pero si la protesta es absorbida y pasa a formar parte del sistema, la desobediencia se reduce y la rebelión se aplaza. El hecho es que, al no haber recibido ninguna garantía de que se hará un intento razonable de solucionar sus quejas, es poco probable que la comisión consiga alguno de sus objetivos. La comisión de quejas de la prisión de Stanford fracasó en su misión principal: poder hacer mella en la armadura del sistema. No obstante, los reclusos se van satisfechos de haber podido airear sus quejas y de que una autoridad, aunque no sea de un nivel muy alto, les haya prestado atención. Los”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, El efecto Lucifer: El porqué de la maldad (Esenciales de Psicología)

“The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Jedynym koniecznym warunkiem triumfu zła jest to, żeby dobrzy ludzie nie robili nic.
(Edmund Burke)”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“insular”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“the bad apple–dispositional view ignores the apple barrel and its potentially corrupting situational impact on those within it. A systems analysis focuses on the barrel makers, on those with the power to design the barrel.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“Systems, not just dispositions and situations, must be taken into account in order to understand complex behavior patterns.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn 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. In short, it is “knowing better but doing worse.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“most of us know ourselves only from our limited experiences in familiar situations that involve rules, laws, policies, and pressures that constrain us.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil