The Lucifer Effect: How Do Good People Get Bad? It is the book in which Philip Zimbardo presents his experience in Stanford Prison, one of the most relevant experiences in the history of psychology, the results of which have changed our vision of the human being, the influence of the environment in which we live and the role we play in our behaviors and attitudes.
In this book, Zimbardo asks the following questions: What drives a good person to do evil?How can one act immorally in a company?Where is the line between good and evil and who is likely to cross it?, let’s see what the Stanford Prison experience is all about.
- Philip Zimbardo.
- A professor at Stanford University.
- Wanted to study humans in a context of freedom.
- To achieve this.
- Zimbardo proposed simulating a prison on the university premises.
- After preparing such facilities to simulate a prison.
- Zimbardo occupied it with “prisoners”.
- “.
- And “guards.
- ” Thus.
- For this experiment.
- Zimbardo recruited students who.
- In exchange for a small amount of money.
- Were willing to play these roles.
The experiment involved 24 students, who were randomly divided between these two groups (prisoners and guards). To increase realism and achieve greater immersion in these roles, inmates underwent a surprise detention process (with the cooperation of the police) and then, already in the mock Stanford prison, they were dressed as prisoners and their names were exchanged for identification numbers. The guards were given uniforms and sunglasses to further the role of authority.
At the beginning of Stanford’s prison experiment, most inmates saw the situation as a joke and the immersion was minimal, however, the guards, in order to reassert their authority and have the prisoners behave like prisoners, began to make routine and unjustified accounts. Inspections.
The guards began forcing prisoners to comply with certain rules, such as repeating their identification numbers during recounts; Moreover, if they disobeyed this order, the prisoners were forced to do push-ups, these games?Or orders, initially harmless, on the second day, gave way to true and violent humiliations of prisoners by the guards.
The guards punished prisoners without eating or sleeping, put them in a closet for hours, forced them to stand naked and even forced them to pretend to practice oral sex with each other. Because of these humiliations, the prisoners forgot that they were students in an experiment and began to think they were true prisoners.
The Stanford Prison experience had to be cancelled on the sixth day due to violence resulting from students being completely immersed in the roles assigned to them. The question that comes to mind now is “why did the guards reach this level of perversity with The Prisoners?”
After observing the behavior of the guards, did Zimbardo try to identify the variables that led a normal group – without pathological symptoms – for students to act as they did, we cannot attribute the misconduct presented by the students who were guards to the fact that they were bad, since the formation of each group was random. Even before the experiment, a test of violence was conducted with these students and the results were clear: they passed it in little or no measure.
Thus, the factor must have been somewhat intrinsic to experience and Zimbardo began to believe that the strength of the situation created in prison had led these peaceful students to act with malice.
Curious, because we tend to think that evil is a dispositional factor, that is, there are bad people and good people regardless of the role or circumstances to which they are subjected, that is, we tend to think that the force of disposition or personality is stronger than the force that circumstances or roles may have, in this sense Zimbardo’s experience told us otherwise , that’s why the immediate results and conclusions of the experiment were revolutionary.
The situation, as well as the person’s awareness of the context, is what leads that person to behave one way or another, so when the situation leads us to perform a violent or evil act, if we are not aware of it, there is nothing we can do to prevent it.
In the Stanford prison experiment, Zimbardo created a perfect context for inmates to suffer a depersonalization process in the eyes of guards, this depersonalization occurred by multiple factors, such as the asymmetry of power between guards and inmates, the homogenization of the group of inmates in the eyes of guards, the replacement of names with identification numbers Etc. Did all this lead the guards to look at the prisoners as prisoners before seeing them as people they could sympathize with and with whom, in fact, outside the simulated context of the Experiment they shared the same role: they were all students.
The last conclusion Zimbardo leaves in his book is that there are no demons or heroes?Or at least there is less than we think, so evil and good would be largely the product of circumstances rather than a particular Personality or values acquired in childhood. Basically, this message is optimistic: virtually anyone can perform a diabolical act, but at the same time, anyone can also perform a heroic act.
All we need to do to avoid the former is to identify the characteristics of the situation or our role that can lead us to behave badly or cruelly. Zimbardo presents us in his book a decalogue? Antimaldity?To act against the pressures of the situation.
One question that can be left to a possible reflection is the following situation that we all face: when we assess that a person is acting maliciously, we analyze the situation in which he finds himself and the pressures to which he is subjected or simply categorize him as evil?