Humans set great store by good character. Virtues from kindness to generosity are understandably packaged up and sold as a commendable ideal to which we'd all do well to strive. Those who succeed in earning this elusive monicker are heralded as paragons of the community, dependable souls who keep the world turning, while those who fall sinfully short are dismissed as wretched creatures, disappointing offspring who weigh society down with their weak wills and their depraved souls.
Notwithstanding its judgmental nature, there are no surprises here. Communities should self-select for virtuousness over sinfulness. They should cultivate integrity, honesty and drive. But what if these virtues are not teachable? What if they aren't innate? What if they can be realized and relinquished, attained and discarded, by the same human based on nothing more than circumstance? Society would implode, torn apart by an untenable realization that virtue is malleable and that trustworthiness is situational. And yet this is precisely the contention advanced by Mr. Zimbardo's excellent rumination on the nature of evil.
In 1971, while a young grad student at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo conceived of an experiment that would shake the ivory towers of psychology departments the world over. Selecting two-dozen paid volunteers from a pool of nearly a hundred, Zimbardo established a life-like prison in the basement of the university's psychology building into which he poured his willing participants, each of whom was given a role as either a guard or a prisoner. Guards were bestowed with nightsticks and uniforms, anonymizing sunglasses and supreme authority. The only check on their power was a prohibition against physically abusing any of their charges. Prisoners, meanwhile, were, like their real-world counterparts, compelled to let go of their individuality by adopting a uniform outfit and dehumanizing numerical designations. They were caged and malnourished, also like real prisoners, and warned that disobedience would be punished. If the experiment became too intense, they were free to quit at any time.
This was a college experiment, staged on college grounds, directed by a college graduate and performed by college students. It ought to have been, in every sense, a controlled and controllable experiment. And yet, over the next six days of the scheduled two-week experiment, the experiment's designers witnessed, in the abusive guards, the degraded prisoners and the wardens who allowed the many acts of humiliation to take place, a shocking, nightmarish truth about human nature, that human decency is situational, that good people, when endowed with extraordinary authority, are capable of equally extraordinary cruelty, that those who are deprived of their liberty quickly become cognitively captured by the degradation of their environment, and that those involved in such power scenarios are completely oblivious to these profound shifts in behavior. Simply put, while we can be said to have baseline personalities that are the gestalt of all of our experiences, these personalities are made utterly malleable by the demands and the temptations of authority to the extent that, when placed in altered circumstances, they are re-shaped to fit a newer and darker reality.
Reflecting on this seminal experiment and those that came after it, Mr. Zimbardo, in The Lucifer Effect not only examines the chilling degree to which we can be made monsters by circumstance, he applies these experimental results to the horrors of the Abu Grabe prison scandal which rocked the US military during the early stages of the most recent Iraq War. He details how, for humans, normal is a variable, not a constant. It can be shaped and toyed with, stretched and manipulated, such that not even the humans affected by it comprehend that their normal has changed. While Mr. Zimbardo points out that this logic can be beneficial, used to elevate dark normalities by slowly lifting them into the light, he acknowledges that this is vanishingly rare compared to the frequency with which kings and warlords, revolutionaries and drug-traffickers, prey upon human malleability to debase the noble and silence the unwilling.
Though burdened at times by Mr. Zimbardo's oppressive humility, The Lucifer Effect is a captivating journey through human nature. His premise, that institutional circumstances made good apples bad, rather than the common view that bad apples sour good barrels, claims both the ring of truth and the solidity of good research to support it. All other contentions appear to fall well short of convincing when set against the terrifying evidence of both Mr. Zimbardo's revolutionary experiment and Abu Grabe, it's real-world counterpart.
However, more fascinating than even the monsters and the revelations unleashed here are Mr. Zimbardo's reflections on the nature of heroism. He spends a considerable portion of his work contemplating why some among us appear to be largely immune to the seductions of authority. Indeed, such paragons appear to actively resist such authority, fully aware that to do so is to profoundly jeopardize their own self-interests and even their safety. And yet these individuals do so anyway, secure in the knowledge that right is right and that no darkness can separate them from virtue. After being chilled to the bone by the author's analysis of authority's power, the notion that, to some degree, goodness stands beyond and above temptation is as heartening as it is mystifying.
No 600-page, autobiographical text on human psychology has the capacity to be gripping. But if such work can ever claim to be revelatory in a meaningful way, The Lucifer Effect claims the mantle. For it compels its readers to re-imagine not only human nature in general but the suffocating nature of prisons and the extent to which they leech from both guards and prisoners alike hope and humanity. Well done... (4/5 Stars)
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