The Lucifer Effect

The Lucifer Effect

Introduction

The book of psychology that is presented for the review is the 'The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil'. The author of the book is Philip Zimbardo who is a prominent social psychologist. In this book, the author has discussed the reasons and factors that make people act with dishonesty or ignite the motivation towards evil deeds. The main theme of the book revolves around the study of prisons and the experiment on the thinking and perception of the criminals. Zimbardo has attempted to illuminate the causes related to psychology behind the disturbing metamorphoses of prisons and prisoners. The ideas and study presented in the book also leads to the understanding of the varying phenomena present in our society including the corporate misconducts and the organized holocaust of the people in the society. The focus and subject of the research of Zimbardo includes the abusive and torturing behavior of US soldiers on the Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The book is a daring effort to show the mirror to the mankind regarding their behaviors and their effects on the social settings of the whole society. The concepts presented in the book and the findings and results of the study are helpful in changing the perception of people regarding the human behavior.

Summary

The research study of Zimbardo intends to identify the behaviors of the people that lead them towards evil actions and behaviors in the society. The initial part of the book describes the historical events and situations that promote brutality, offensive behaviors and evil deeds among the people. The author examined the history through the use of secondary resources. He examined the examples of inhumanity to men that are present in the history. Some of the examples include the event of Nanking in which Japanese people brutality killed around 350, 000 Chinese civilians in the year 1937. The genocide and holocaust of 800, 000 people in Rwandans that was embodied by Adolf Eichmann in 1994.

In 2004, an American news programme revealed the photographs of prisoners of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who were treated like non humans in the images. Professor Zimbardo was strongly affected by the photographs of naked prisoners of Iraq who were bundled in the form of human pyramid and the US soldiers were supervising them. A female US soldier holding a leash in front of ...