The Lucifer Effect ★★★★☆

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Click Here To Buy)

★★★★☆

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo is a non-fiction book about how good people can succumb to evil deeds and what we can do to stop it. A major portion of the book’s focus is on Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.

I read this as an audiobook read by the author on Audible.

Right off the bat, I’ve got to say this is not light or easy reading. Zimbardo talks about some pretty horrific actions and there were moments where it became a bit too much for me. As a mental health professional, I learned about the Stanford Prison Experiment in college and this was why I wanted to read the book. For those who don’t know, the SPE was an experiment Zimbardo conducted in the 1970s with college students simulating guards and prisoners in the basement of Stanford. The experiment got so out of hand with the abuses by the guards and the mental unravelling of the prisoners, that the experiment had to be shut down after just 6 days. This book does a great job of going through what happened in the experiment day by day and then analyzing the results. In later chapters, Zimbardo talks about the tortures at Abu Ghraib and connects them to that what happened during the SPE. Throughout the text, Zimbardo speaks of a number of other morality studies from Bandura to Milgram.

Zimbardo concludes that the main things that bring out the evil in people is anonymity and mindless obedience. In order to fight that, we must always take full responsibility for our actions and assert personal authority. In 2015, a movie titled The Stanford Prison Experiment was made and Zimbardo was a writer, using the Lucifer Effect as the main text - 10/10 would recommend. Overall his book was very interesting but it got a bit long and I think some chapters that were less relevant could have been edited out.

If you liked The Lucifer Effect, I also recommend The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell, Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer, and American Prison by Shane Bauer.

Happy reading,

Ms.Bjork