The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

The Stanford Prison Experiment assesses “the extent to which the external features of an institutional setting [can] override the internal dispositions of the actors in that environment” (195). The experiment has become famous for exposing that bad systems and situations can cause good people to behave in evil ways alien to their nature. The loss of personal identity, the subjection to arbitrary continual control, the loss of privacy, and the sleep deprivation that the prisoners experienced during the experiment all caused what is now known as “learned helplessness” (195). Because the prisoners were screened prior to the experiment to ensure they did not import any pathologies, Zimbardo concludes that all “pathologies were elicited by the set of situational forces constantly impinging upon them in this prisonlike setting” (197).

Zimbardo identifies problems present in data analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment: the sample size is small, video recordings are selective, causal directions are uncertain, and the experiment has no control group. The only independent variable is “the treatment of guard-versus-prisoner status” (197). Zimbardo concludes, however, that clear patterns emerge.

Prior to the experiment, subjects were evaluated on three different measures: “the F-Scale of authoritarianism, the Machiavellian Scale of interpersonal manipulation strategies, and the Comrey Personality Scales” (198). Prisoners and guard groups had obtained similar F-Scale scores. Prisoners who lasted the duration of the study had scored higher on the F-Scale than those who were sent home early. The guard group had a slightly higher Machiavellian Scale score than the prisoners, but score differences among participants did not affect subjects’ behavior. Subjects exhibited several different individual behaviors that corresponded to their Comrey Personality Scale, but Zimbardo deems individual differences insignificant. Significantly, there were “no personality precursors for the difference between the four meanest guards and the others who were less abusive” (200).

In their mood adjective self-reports, prisoners described themselves much more negatively than the guards, while the guards described themselves as more negative than positive. Prisoner scores were double the guards’ score on activity-passivity. Prisoners who left the experiment early scored higher on depression and unhappiness, but their scores changed to elevated positivity soon after they were released: “This return to normality seems to reflect the ‘situational specificity’ of the depression and stress reactions these students experienced while playing their unusual roles” (201).

Analysis of the video recordings reveals “an excess of negative, hostile interactions between the guards and prisoners” (202). Videos also show that guards escalated their harassment over time, and prisoners correspondingly behaved worse and worse. Analysis of the audio recordings exposes that guards had as much negative outlook and negative self-regard as prisoners. Audio recordings also show that 90 percent of conversations among prisoners related solely to prison issues: “The prisoner role dominated all expressions of individual character. The prison setting dominated their outlook and concerns—forcing them into an expanded present temporal orientation” (204).

Consequently, prisoners slowly grew to accept the negative experiences that the guards imposed on them. Zimbardo classifies half of all the experiment’s private prisoner interactions as lacking mutual support and cooperation, and 85 percent of prisoner statements regarding fellow prisoners as “uncomplimentary and depreciating” (205). He explains that the prison setting that served to humiliate the prisoners impacted the prisoners’ impressions of each other. The prisoners became one with their enemy, and this process prevented realistic appraisals of the situation, inhibited action against their oppressors and their ability to cope, and quashed their own rebellion.

Zimbardo claims that the Stanford Prison Experiment’s basic protocol enabled its success, arguing that, while the prison setting is artificial, “all research is ‘artificial,’ being only an imitation of its real-world analogue” (206). Zimbardo argues that despite the experiment’s artificiality, its results have considerable generalizability because it presents psychological features central to the “prison experience.” The experiment shows that possessing a psychology of individual invulnerability to situational forces compromises individuals by making them insufficiently vigilant to situational forces. Zimbardo argues that people can avoid, prevent, challenge, and change negative situational forces by recognizing their power.

The experiment showed Zimbardo that situational power is strongest in unfamiliar settings. Every analysis should begin situationally and yield to dispositional analysis only when the situational analysis does not suffice to explain behavior. The experiment also exposes “the power of rules” (212): a simple and formal method of controlling informal complex behavior. Some societal rules are necessary, but many allow the rule makers and enforcers to dominate, as the prison experiment proves. Further, the experiment shows anonymity’s power to induce persons to behave in antisocial ways, especially in a setting which grants permission for such actions: “When all members of a group of individuals are in a deindividuated state, their mental functioning changes: they live in an expanded-present moment that makes past and future distant and irrelevant” (219).

Perhaps the most profound observations from the experiment are the ones that related to the dehumanizing attitudes the experiment conferred on participants. Dehumanization occurs when individuals believe “others” do not have the same feelings, thoughts, values, and life purposes as they do. Human relationships are subjective, personal, and emotional, while dehumanized relationships are objectifying, analytical, and nonempathetic. Consequently, the prison experiment was able to dehumanize the participants in the same way a real prison dehumanizes its prisoners. Lacking personal space and a sense of true community, inmates are isolated and anonymous; the guards determined how they would react to each other, so “[t]ender, caring emotions were absent among both guards and prisoners after only a few days” (223).

Systems create what Zimbardo calls ‘Situations’ by providing the institutional support, authority, and resources that Situations need to operate. Determining who or what controls a System is difficult in complex organizations, such as correctional facilities, megacorporations, and governmental entities. According to Zimbardo, “System Power involves authorization or institutionalized permission to behave in prescribed ways or to forbid and punish actions that are contrary to them” (226). New ways of behaving lead to new norms and ethics, judged by new authority figures unique to the System.