Philip Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo
How People Become Monsters…or Heroes


Zimbardo talks about how it seems so easy for some one nice to turn “evil”. He uses examples from Stanly Milgram’s experiments, his own Staford Prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib trials. How it isn’t necessarily the people are “rotten apples”, but that the situation they are placed in facilitates the “evil” actions.

I like Zimbardo and most of his viewpoints about psychology. In this particular subject, I agree completely with him. I think the most significant point he brought up throughout was that while in some cases the evil actions people took may have started from lack of authority and enforcement of rules from a higher structure of things, sometimes it’s the authority figures who start the evil actions and they use their authority to get normally “nice” people to cooperate. He used the Holocaust and Stanley Milgram’s experiment as examples of blindly following orders. Even what happened at Abu Ghraib to an extent (they were told to “take the gloves off”). While other situations like the Stanford Prison experiment, seemed to come out of a lack of higher authority. Either way, it suggests that the institution isn’t perfect and can be an opportunity for people to do evil things.



Three links associated with the individual or talk
Philip Zimbardo’s home page
Zimbardo’s own website with information about him and his works as well as links to things like interviews.

The Lucifer Effect
The website version of his book by the same name, the Lucifer Effect is the long, more elaborate version of his TED talk. He references The Lucifer Effect several times in his talk.

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
The link to The Lucifer Effect book through Google books. It provides a portion of the book that you can read.