The release date for the English version of 'The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil' by
Philip G. Zimbardo is Mar 2007. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
The authoritative first-hand narrative of Philip Zimbardo's revolutionary study, which served as the inspiration for the critically acclaimed movie The Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo, a renowned social psychologist and the man behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, examines the reasons why morally upright individuals might be persuaded to behave immorally, as well as the implications of this for the demarcation between good and evil.
The Lucifer Effect explains the many reasons why we are all vulnerable to the allure of "the dark side" as well as how it happens. Utilizing historical instances along with his own groundbreaking studies, Zimbardo explains how situational factors and social dynamics may combine to turn good people into monsters.
For the first time, Zimbardo provides a detailed account of the Stanford Prison Experiment, a seminal research in which participants who were college students were split into two groups at random—"guards" and "inmates"—and put in a prison simulation. The research was dropped after only one week, with regular college students being turned into heartbroken captives or vicious, cruel guardians.
Zimbardo helps us comprehend a range of horrific situations, from corporate wrongdoing to organized genocide to how previously honorable American troops came to mistreat and torture Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib, by shedding light on the psychological underpinnings of such unsettling metamorphoses. The idea that the social environment and the system infect the person rather than the other way around is what he substitutes the long-held concept of the "bad apple" with: the "bad barrel."
This book has the audacity to hold up a mirror to humanity and suggest that we may not be as self-assured as we believe. Zimbardo, however, gives us hope even as he challenges us to reconsider what we are capable of achieving when we find ourselves in the furnace of behavioral dynamics. He contends that we are able to thwart evil and may even learn how to behave courageously. Similar to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Lucifer Effect is an eye-opening, captivating study that will alter our perception of human nature.