Good And Evil In The Lucifer Effect By Philip Zimbardo

Our world is, and always will be, infested with evil. Many people would like to believe that there is a balance between good and evil; however, good people can be seduced to the evil side of life, and it is important to analyze why they would want to go to that side in the first place. In The Lucifer Effect, published in 2007, author Philip Zimbardo defines evil as the “exercise of power to intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people morally and to commit crimes against humanity”. The Lucifer Effect establishes the fundamental question about the essence of human nature: How is it possible for ordinary, average, even good people become perpetrators of evil? While trying to understand unusual or bizarre

This example of Lucifer turning into Satan digresses into a less dramatic investigation of ordinary people converting into miscreant of evil. The book provides a detailed chronology of the transformations in human character that took place during an experiment designed by Zimbardo himself, which called for randomly selected healthy, normal, and intelligent college students to play roles of prisoner or guard in a monitored and projected study called the Stanford Prison Experiment. This experiment helps make sense of corporate malfeasance of “administrative evil”, or authoritative figures abusing their power to accentuate and express evil by means of egocentrism. This two week-long study was terminated after only six days because of the extreme stress and emotional breakdowns several of the prisoners experienced. These guards were abusing their power by forcing the prisoners to do humiliating tasks, stripping them naked, and sexually degrading them. People are not born evil; good and bad behaviors are either engaged or disengaged depending on the situation people find themselves

Examples of evil in my life are less dramatic. Evil can be subjective; my mother believes that anything that is not religiously supported is evil. We have sat in church during Fr. Pedigo’s homily where he discussed the importance of the acceptance of anyone who expresses themselves differently from the catholic church’s beliefs. He used people of other religions, homosexuals, etcetera as examples. My mother believes that Catholicism is the only religion that should be practiced, since, according to her, every other religion is a downgraded version of her faith. On the other hand, some people view the beliefs of those like my mother as evil. It is all subjective. In my opinion, doing things that make a whole mass of people happy, anything that people do in order to express themselves, is not evil. Moreover, as an ordinary and moral human being, I cannot bear evil-doing towards other people. Evil doing towards myself, however, is another story. The insults and degradation I have said to myself is just as evil as saying such things to other people. I have dealt with self-doubt, low self-esteem, anxiety, and sometimes self-loathe. My confidence plummets and my anxiety heightens in the most uneventful of situations. I believe that these things are an infestation of evil in my own head meaning, I can be inhumane towards