The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

In the Stanford prison experiment, Zimbardo analyzes how human behavior can change based one’s surroundings and what they are told to do. Normal college students are given roles to play in a mock prison. In this experiment, people are assigned jobs as prison guards and prisoners. The prison guards quickly adapted to their roles. They saw no problem treating the prisoners with no respect. These students use violence against the other students to show their leadership and dominance. The prisoners quickly got accustomed to their parts as well.The prisoners believed that they deserved the punishment. “The experiment shows that good people under the wrong circumstances can behave just like those that we vilify” (Zimbardo). With this experiment, Zimbardo studies the Lucifer Effect. The Lucifer Effect is understanding how good people become evil. He uses his data from this experiment to further develop the Lucifer Effect theory and find out why the Nazis treated the Jews with such cruelty. His results show that when given the opportunity and in the right environment, humans will dehumanize other

The Psychology of Good and Evil in contrast to Ferguson Unrest and Race in America

The Lucifer Effect can be explained by three key factors that cause a person to lose a sense of self. Founded by Philip Zimbardo he explained that people turn bad by explaining that they are either a “bad apple”, it is circumstantial, or systematic. These three elements are enough to turn any productive member of society and make them lose sight of any morals or ethics they once had. In turn, the factors might have a

For years, many have questioned the so called “evil” that seems to be inside of people. There have been multiple experiments set to find the answers to these questions. Although, the real question is, why do people act the way they do? Rob Reiner, director of the movie A Few Good Men is about Daniel Kaffee, a military lawyer, who is assigned to defend two US Marines accused of murdering Pfc. William Santiago. With the help of Lt. Sam Weinberg and Lt. Cdr. JoAnn Galloway, Kaffe brings the accused Marines, Lance Cpl. Harold Dawson and Pfc. Louden Downey, into court to prove that they are innocent of murder because they were “just following orders” (Reiner). However, why did Dawson and Downey follow the orders, if they knew the result would be hurting another? Maybe it was because of the situation, or how obedient the two Marines were, or many it is just the plain and simple evil at work. Nevertheless, two articles that mention the experiments to test this is “The Stanford Prison Experiment” by Philip Zimbardo and “The Perils of Obedience” by Stanley Milgram. The results gathered from these experiments confirms the belief of hidden wickedness inside human beings. Plus Zimbardo himself made an hypothesis that good people can become evil in the blink of an eye. He based this hypothesis on his prison experiment. Both of these authors addresses how their experiments determine how obedience and the situation can determine the outcome, which just supports

Relating to evil is what is known as the “Lucifer Effect”, discovered and studied over

The author of this book is Phillip Zimbardo. He is a psychologist and professor at Stanford University. As part of the title of the Lucifer Effect, this book about understanding how good people turn evil. As he tries to explain this, he divides the book in sections. The first chapter he explains that the world is filled with good and evil. The term that caught my attention was “permeable” and that good by the transformation of both good and evil, leading to the question “am I capable of evil?” He has us keep this question in mind as we read through the chapters. The following chapters explain the events that happened at Stanford

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Every indivdual has the decision between good and evil. Not every person will choose the right side of the line. When an indivdual crosses over the line to the evil side this is known as The Lucifer Effect. Philip Zimbardo, the individual that coined the idea, presented the ideas behind why people change and turn evil even if though their whole life they were not known as an evil person. According to Zimbardo, people turn evil for one of two reasons; The Lucifer Effect and the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil (TED Talks).

Most of us are activists in the field of properly disarming ourselves of cruelty, but what if we were placed in a different environment? An environment full of hierarchy, superiority and personal gain? Imagine being inside a prison. Humans were placed within a prison study and underwent changes they never imagined possible. Philip Zimbardo, an experimentalist with a Ph.D in psychology, collected results on a prison study conducted at Stanford University. Zimbardo randomly assigned students to play prisoners or guards and “in only a few days, the guards became sadistic, Zimbardo writes: the power of a host of situational variables can dominate an individual’s will to resist” (Grant). All of these competent and successful college students transformed into hideous monsters. At an alarming rate, the cruel punishments towards the prisoners increased at the same speed of inmate emotional distress. As a result of this, “the level of harassment got too high and what had been planned as a two-week experimental period had to be called off after six days in the experiment” (Veznikova). The test had worked too well. It proved that everyone has a deep rooted stem of evil blossoming within their hearts. Even glorified famous actors that are clearly looked up upon possess the instinct of

Let us face it, mankind admires violence. It may not be moral, but it is entertaining. For example, fighting is prohibited, but wrestling is just a popular pastime. As a result of loving unreasonable habits such as violence, one might wonder if the nature of mankind is naturally evil or good, but they do not know what to do without adults. Mankind is born naturally evil, however, your surroundings can determine whether or not you stay that way.

Taylor speaks about the mistake people often make in assuming people are “innately” good or bad. The overwhelming theme of the article is the fluidity of good and evil, that people are good or evil at different points in their lives. He condemns the attitude of the justice system, which imprisons criminals because they are ‘bad’ and can’t be rehabilitated. Taylor writes that it has been shown that criminals who are thought to be ‘bad’ can be rehabilitated to be ‘good’ and show empathetic actions. He also says that instead of evil being innate, it’s actually caused by “environmental factors.” Taylor describes the epitome of what is perceived as good as Mahatma Gandhi and the epitome of evil as Adolf Hitler, but states that most people lie in the middle, ready to tilt either way, as is human nature. Humans are not created good or evil; they are a blank slate colored in by what they experience. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll releases the urges shunned in his childhood and because he was taught to only be ‘good’ as a child, he was all the more ‘bad’. Steven Taylor’s article in Psychology Today shows good examples of the fluidity of good and

Sometimes we wonder why people do things. Is it because they were forced to? Maybe they were pressured into it, or maybe they thought it was the right thing to do. In the book The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo he studies the psychological motives of humans and situational personalities. Zimbardo produced an experiment called the “Stanford prison experiment” which put one group of students as guards and another as the prisoners. The main point of the experiment was to watch the prisoners and see how they reacted to being detained; however, when the experiment was conducted it was the guards who were more interesting to study.

Reading The Lucifer Effect was an eye opener for me. It got me thinking do we really know anyone for that matter do we know ourselves? There are times in of our lives, have we been astonished to learn about the activities of someone we thought we knew very well. Are those who commit atrocities people with serious character defects or psychopathology, or are they ordinary people responding to an extraordinary situation? The Lucifer Effect delivers some possible rationalizations for these personal mysteries in which we deal with. This book also gives some prospective on perplexed ideas of our own actions that may contradict our previous thought of our own identities. In this reflection paper I will be

The Lucifer Effect describes the point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between good and evil to engage in an evil action. Such how Lucifer was once one of God’s Angels and he fell and became Satan. How he was once good and now is seen as bad. There are several different perspectives that can cause people to commit evil acts, such as: essentialist, incrementalist, dispositional/ situational, and the power systems approach. The majority of the population perceive evil as an entity, evil is in some people and not in others. The essentialist approach states that evil is concentrated in certain types of people. To help define evil, one may use examples such as Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein.

Las Vegas, Sandy Hook, Columbine, and 9/11: all acts of pure evil. More and more we see these evil acts in schools, concerts and daily life. Their prevalence alarms many and they do not seem to be slowing down any time soon. These evil acts pass throughout society by lone wolves, sociopaths, and even terrorist groups. Although some people view doing evil as more challenging than doing good because it goes against their moral boundaries and conscience, others see it as easier, more enticing, beneficial, and pleasurable. In addition, evil leads to a sense of self-confidence and superiority that may be otherwise unachievable. Man can be subject to outside influences, infiltrating their hearts because they desire to fit in.

The Lucifer effect involves the question on why good people do evil things such as murder, torture, or rape others. This concept was brought to life by Philip Zimbardo and has been debated over for many years. Before Philip Zimbardo, many people would say that the reason that they do evil things is that those good people had something wrong with them. Although, they never considered the fact of circumstances or deindividuation, which is what he explains in Zimbardo Speaks: The Lucifer Effect and the Psychology of Evil and another video over the Stanford Prison Experiment.