The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

To me, conceptually, this is an interesting subject. I love reading and learning about morality and how humans can make ‘evil’ choices, or what would make a ‘good’ person do a ‘bad’ thing. Zimbardo sprinkles the book with an insight into this with examples from Rwanda, suicide bombers, and a few other things. However the vast majority of the book is centered on his Stanford Prison Experiment. I wish this was just a book named and titled about that, rather than The Lucifer Effect, I’m not one to complain about naming often, but I thought it set a different expectation.

That being said, I did come to find a lot of value derived from reading about his experiment. Surrounding his extremely detailed explanation of the experiment is a lot to learn from about power, dehumanization, creating ‘others’, loyalty, identity etc.. and how it all revolves around turning good people into bad people, sometimes without their explicit knowledge of it, and how a separate group of people can become the victims of those who were good and turned evil.

In the end, I would recommend reading this - but if I could condense the amount of detail in the prisoner experiment, and get to the heart of the matters and maybe connect more real world examples, this would be a more highly recommended book. Speed through the middle, and you’ll enjoy this more.