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Philip Zimbardo. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York: Random House, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-8129-7444-7 (Pbk). Pp. 488.
This book is a must-read for peace and conflict scholars. Few thinker-writers would attempt his task: to examine evil and good, monstrous behaviour, and heroes who resist evil. A social psychologist, Zimbardo proposes an "...investigation into human transformations of good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil, in response to the corrosive influence of powerful situational forces" (Foreword).
The three forces of personal choice, situation and social context, and systemic forces contribute to horrifying transformations. First, while acknowledging individual responsibility, Zimbardo affirms that individual behaviour is embedded within genetic, biological, and psychological makeup. Second, the situation of a particular place and time influences behaviour. Phenomena such as conformity, deindividuation, and bystander inaction-acquiescence to group influence-are explored in sobering depth and applied to peace and conflict studies. Third, systemic forces can create and maintain behaviour. Zimbardo attends particularly to issues of belief, authority, control and power, and ways these can be misused to initiate evil behaviour.
Zimbardo begins with a thorough introductory summary. In Chapter 1, he reviews the psychology of evil, setting up his examination of "the dark...