The Lucifer Effect, By Philp Zimbardo

The Lucifer Effect authored by Philp Zimbardo was created to help people understand how good people turn evil. The book begins by explaining what the Lucifer Effect actually is in biblical turns, and then goes on to explain what occurred in Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment. Lucifer “The Morning Star” was God’s most trusted angel until he challenged God’s authority. When Lucifer challenged God’s authority he was cast into Hell, thus becoming Satan. This was ultimate transformation of good into evil. The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) was designed to test what caused good people to do bad things. In order to begin the experiment, Philp and his research team had to solve a few problems before beginning. First, they needed a controlled space where they could monitor the prisoners and guards and not be interrupted. The solution was the basement of the Stanford Psychology department. The research team spent several days creating a mock

First, most people are moral creatures most of the time, however sometimes people do the wrong thing. According to Zimbardo “evil is knowing better, but doing worse.” This means that regular people act in accordance with society by obeying the norms that have been placed in front of them. Sometimes however people violate these norms. Secondly, people are moral creatures until they obtain power. Power changes people, for example, the guards were normal nice guys, but once they were given the power that came with being a guard they changed. They became abusive people whose goal was to humiliated and embarrass the prisoner. Finally, situational factors can cause people to change. An example of this is the factors that caused the guards to change. The guards wanted to maintain order in the prison and at first the prisoners would not obey them, so the guards became meaner, thus causing the prisoners to finally obey the