4th June, 2007
Black and White
Book review, the second.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo.
You can always tell that you’ve picked up a social science book when the title is something along the lines of: “My Cat Puked on the Carpet: The Paradigm of the Human Experience” or “Sipping Through a Paper Straw: Why Closeted Dorks Never Get Any”. I’m not sure why they do this, perhaps it is a requirement of the publisher, but this seems to be the formula they always follow. A clever bunch, those social scientists.
Philip Zimbardo is probably best known for his role in the Stanford Prision Experiment in the early ’70s at Stanford University. If you are anything like me 3 weeks ago, this statement will mean absolutely nothing to you. Maybe I slept through that discussion in my Psych 101 class all those years ago, but I had never heard of this guy until now. That being said, lets get into the review.
The book is mostly comprised of two parts: a detailed telling and analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), followed by discussion and analysis of the events at the Abu Ghraib prison where he draws parallels between the two. There is also some discussion of other atrocities around the world and a section on what one can do to act as a “hero” when faced with such situations.
At this point, it is probably beneficial to give you an idea of just what went on during the SPE: Build a prison-like environment in the basement of an old building. Recruit some college-aged men, screen out the wackos. From your screened pool of volunteers, randomly assign “guard” and “prisoner” roles. Drop them into your “prison” and watch what happens.
The SPE was originally scheduled to run for two weeks. A week didn’t even pass before it had to be shut down as things were spiraling out of control. The rapid transformations that occured in the volunteers (both “guard” and “prisoner”) were astonishing and the results of the entire experiment were truly eye-opening. There is some really good stuff in here.
To be honest, once I hit the analysis portion of the book, I started losing interest pretty rapidly. I’m not sure if I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind at the time or if the material truly was lacking. Either way, it just wasn’t doing it for me and I ended up skimming through the majority of it.
In all, a pretty good book, but I’m knocking off half a gog for making me sleepy.
3.5/5 gogs.
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