Philip Zimbardo's Ted Talk: The Lucifer Effect

In Philip Zimbardo’s Ted Talk he discusses his book The Lucifer Effect and the psychology of evil. Zimbardo asks “what makes people go wrong?” It does not take much to turn a good person to a bad person. For most people it is like a light switch that can be turned on and off. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment by the name of The Stanford Prison Experiment. Students volunteered to be either be a prisoner or a prison guard for 2 weeks. Zimbardo was studying how the college boys would react and how their behavior would change even though they were separated by a coin flip. By the 3rd day the prison guards began to abuse the prisoners in a physically and sexually manner because they had the authority to do so. The Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq relates closely to Zimbardo’s experiment, because no one stepped in to stop the actions that were taking place soon enough.

The Abu Ghraib Prison took place in 2003.

The United States Military Police guards tortured suspected terrorists and innocent Iraqi men and women in cells. Prisoners of both the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib were tortured and humiliated by taking pictures of them with bags over their heads, making them wear degrading clothes or no clothes at all, and having them perform sexual simulations with each other such as sodomy and fallattio. Zimbardo says that, “They began to do degrading activities like having them simulate sodomy.” (Zimbardo,15:37). Prisoners in both of the experiments experienced mental breakdowns due to physical, emotional, and mental torture. The prison guards and the military police were given permission to have authority over the prisoners by a more powerful figure and started to abuse their authority to the point of no

return.
In Zimbardo’s book, The Lucifer Effect, he explains his experiment into deep depths from beginning to end. Throughout the book there are many mentions of the Abu Ghraib incident. While watching the news in 2004, Zimbardo came across the horrific images of naked prisoners stacked into a pyramid, men with collars and leashes on, and a man with a sandbag over his head with wires hooked to him to conduct electric torture. Zimbardo says, “I realized that watching some of these images made me relive the worst scenes from the Stanford Prison Experiment.” (Zimbardo, 328)
Today most people are evil without even knowing. Sometimes doing evil things feels like the right action to take during a specific time but being cruel to a human being without even thinking that they are the same as yourself is terrible. Bullying can turn a good person into a bad person in the span of a second. Othering another person because of the color of their skin, the clothes they wear, or the rumors you hear has lead to devastation from suicides and mental illnesses over the years. A bully just like a prison guard or a United States military police can cause long term damage that can take years to fix just like the prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib Prison.

Work Cited
Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York:
Random.2007.Print
Zimbardo, Philip. The Psychology of Evil. TED. February 2008. Lecture