Philip Zimbardo’s, The Lucifer Effect, utilises psychological principles to investigate how ordinary people are able to commit evil most of us could not imagine, and argues that, under certain circumstances, we may all be capable of things that we would prefer not to believe. Readers may recognise Zimbardo’s name from his notorious Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. A social psychologist and Stanford University professor, he was originally curious about how prison guards and prisoners adopt their roles. He recruited 24 college-aged men, confirmed that they were healthy and emotionally stable with no history of mental illness, and randomly assigned them to be either prisoners or guards in a makeshift prison in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo provides a first-person chronological account of the events that occurred before he shut the experiment down after less than a week of its planned two weeks.

The key message of his narrative is that ordinary people can turn evil when a variety of situational factors are in place. Zimbardo identifies several such factors, including dehumanisation, deindividuation, a lack of oversight, social conformity and an expanded time perspective. When peaceful young men were given reflective sunglasses, a baton, and the title of ‘guard’, they began to abuse their peers, despite them having done nothing wrong, as if it were a sport. Even more shockingly, the “prisoners” eventually went along with the charade as well, despite their horrible conditions and treatment. The alarming lesson is that, as Zimbardo puts it, ‘Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us – under the right circumstances’. (211)

This is not an excuse for evil acts or a reason to live in fear, but rather a recognition of our vulnerability to negative situational forces, making us more vigilant against them. It seems that Zimbardo’s form of self-inflicted penance for creating an environment in which this baseless abuse occurred was to warn ordinary people everywhere of their own potential for evil. He did this by participating in further research and social action, often serving as an expert witness. One of these trials involved military police accused of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib, a U.S.-run military prison in Iraq which is the focus of the second half of The Lucifer Effect. Zimbardo’s expertise is valuable in such cases because his investigation revealed that the evil in that prison was rooted in the system rather than in the seven military police who were prosecuted and portrayed as “bad apple” sadists.

As with the abusive guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment, most of the perpetrators of abuse at Abu Ghraib were normal, mentally healthy soldiers with excellent records. The dehumanisation of detainees, living in the present moment with no regard for the past or future, a lack of oversight and often operating in anonymity all contributed to their disturbing torture of Iraqi prisoners. There are many parallels between the descent into evil at the Stanford Prison Experiment and at Abu Ghraib.

One difference that Zimbardo does not emphasise is that, as the ‘superintendent’ of the Stanford prison, he simply told his guards to keep their prisoners in line. In contrast, interrogators and military personnel at black sites such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were explicitly told that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, and that ‘taking the gloves off’ with detainees would save the lives of their fellow soldiers. This difference calls into question not only the fundamental attribution error made about the abusers’ dispositions, but also points to flaws in the United States’ approach to the War on Terror, as well as the culture of paranoia, fear and Islamophobia that emerged in the aftermath of 11 September 2001.

However, while Zimbardo does put the Bush Administration “on trial” for their culpability, that is not the focus of this book. Through his explanation of the Stanford Prison Experiment and his investigation of the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib due to a variety of situational factors, Zimbardo successfully proves that environment often overrides disposition. In his final chapter, he points out that just as ordinary people can become evil, they can also become heroes. At a time of high conflict and division, it is a resonant reminder that any one of us can resist systems that ask us to compromise our own moral standards.