The Lucifer Effect

Zimbardo is the legendary researcher behind the Stanford Prison Experiment. During my time in psychology and math lectures at the basement of Jordan Hall at Stanford, I walked past the hallway where the experiment took place, complete with tiny doors that led to each mock-prison cell, a low, curved, and somewhat oppressive ceiling, and finally a plaque that commemorated it all. This book is a deep dive on evil – without delving into what actually constitutes evil, Zimbardo offers a helpful heuristic: evil as knowing better but doing worse. The main thesis is that situations have outsized influence on evil; in Zimbardo’s analogy, most evil aren’t committed solely by bad apples in the bunch, but rather the bad barrel where they resided plays a significant, often unnoticed role in facilitating evil. Poorly designed or even intentionally evil systems beget bad situations, in which good people are seduced to do bad things they normally wouldn’t think of.

A situation which permits the following will probably result in people letting their dark side loose (and these factors seem broad enough to be applicable to every type of organization). Unchecked power is as intoxicating as it is dangerous, bringing along its one-two punch of the exhilarating high of being in total control, and the crippling paranoia of losing such a high – the most austere can only resist for so long, and the worst succumb immediately, and so a good system should be designed to never allow unchecked power to exist in any one or group. Deindividuation also corrupts: if an individual is not held directly responsible for their actions due to some higher authority or they are anonymous, they’re more likely do their worst – the counter would be a flatter, wider organizational hierarchy, giving everyone agency and thus responsibility, because then they don’t have some higher authority or anonymity to scapegoat. Dehumanization often comes with the worst atrocities like genocide, which are often committed to “extinguish vermin, worms, and cockroaches” rather than “murder wives, sons, neighbors” – practicing empathy on every level of an organization and knowing the “other” group on a personal level makes dehumanizing much harder and cognitively dissonant. Lastly, euphemisms help resolve cognitive dissonance of doing harm by making the action seem less severe and less straining on the mind – “final solution” without context sounds like some crowning culmination of an admirable research pursuit, until it becomes contextualized into senseless genocide.