The Lucifer Effect

Since I was in high school, I have been a big fan of Phillip Zimbardo, his work with the Stanford Prison Experiment sounded so fascinating and troubling (despite replication issues etc).  Therefore, his book, The Lucifer Effect, had been on my to read list for a while.

The majority of the book was a discussion of the aforementioned Stanford Prison Experiment.  It goes into all the details about how even he, nominally a neutral observer, started to get sucked in to all the terrible things the students were doing to each other.  As the general lesson of the experiment is that it doesn't matter what kind of people you have, if you put them into a bad situation, they will act badly, he spends a lot of time emphasizing how it was all random and anyone could have been on either side. 

As someone who had read about the experiment somewhat extensively, this felt like preaching to the choir. Sure, it was interesting to get some intimate details about how the experiment worked, but I already got the core thesis and spending half of the book on this one thing felt like overkill.

The second large chunk of the book was on Abu Ghraib. The parallels to Zimbardo's experiment are obvious.  So obvious, that was the context of most of the discussions I had heard about his work were about how it related to Abu Ghraib.  Zimbardo spends time going into the history and actions of each soldier there and really makes you feel that it wasn't their fault, that it could have been you torturing those inmates if you had been there.

I'll be honest, I didn't finish this section. I skipped over some of the profiles because they seemed redundant given everything I already understood and believed.  I get it, these kids were put in a bad situation.  I get it, they could have been good kids if this hadn't ruined their lives. (Quick aside: neither this book nor I want to trivialize the horrors that happened in this prison.  The American soldiers' lives may have been ruined but something far worse happened to the inmates).  Maybe this section was more poignant when Abu Ghraib was younger but at 10 years past, I think I have seen and absorbed basically every take on Abu Ghraib before I read this.

The last section is the best section of the book and the most interesting to me.  It is about how you can combat the titular Lucifer effect and learn how to be heroic in the situations presented in this book.  Not to give too much away, but he founded a non-profit with the goal of spreading this idea called the Heroic Imagination Project.

I was sad that these very important ideas occupied such a small percentage of the book.  I wish he would have spent more time on this rather than profiling every person charged at Abu Ghraib. 

Overall, I would give this book an 81%.