Zimbardo The Lucifer Effect

After having a ground understanding of how situational forces can make people do immoral thing through conformity and obedience, the psychology of evil: The Lucifer effect can now be explained by Zimbardo’s famous study - Stanford Prison Study. Zimbardo and his team began the experiment by choosing twenty-four healthy male students from his college with no physical or mental disorders or illness, assigned twelve of them to play prisoners role, while the other twelve volunteers were randomly assigned the role of guards. The guards were dressed and provided with wooden batons, uniforms, whistle, and even sunglasses to avoid eye contact with prisoners. Meanwhile, the prisoners were dressed with ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps with chains under their ankles, just like real prisoners. These prisoners were treated like actual criminals and guards were told to do everything they could to maintain law and order in the prison to makes the inmates respect them.

Within a short period of time, both guards and prisoners were quickly settling into their new identities.

At first, guards started to taunt prisoners with insults, give them meaningless tasks to do, and punish them by making them do push-up. After a while, they became more aggressive and assertive by using fire extinguishers to punish prisoners, stripping them, and even taking their beds out of their cells. Meanwhile, prisoners started crying, screaming and became depressed. Many of them had to be released after a few days because they had symptoms of emotional disorders and early stage of depression that could have had lasting consequences for their health (McLeod, 1970). In the end, the experiment had to end earlier than expected because the prisoners could not take it anymore (McLeod,

1970).
After the experiment, Zimbardo had his results and conclusions about how situations and obedience affected humans’ personality and behaviors. It was reported that most of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic. It can be seen that they began to internalize their role too much and forgot out their true self to the point that they didn’t even know this side of them existed until the experiment ended. Even Zimbardo himself had to admit that he didn’t even realize he was thinking like a prison superintendent instead of a research psychologist (Zimbardo, 2008). He could have stop the experiment earlier when he saw the prisoners’ mental breakdown and the guards’ actions, but he didn’t. Zimbardo conformed his thinking by the influence of the guards’ actions. Meanwhile, the guards had done things that they couldn’t even imagine under Zimbardo’s orders. These facts reflect the power of situation through conformity and obedience. On the other hand, the prisoners also experienced mental breakdown and had the tendency to look after only for themselves, rather than stick together with other prisoners like the beginning of the experiment. Based on this result, Zimbardo then had his conclusion by stating that the participants are proved to be psychologically normal at first, but then dramatically changed due to the effect of the situation that they were put in. Human’s morality cannot be decided as “good” or “evil” because we all have the ability to act as both depends on certain situations (Zimbardo, 2008). Therefore, Zimbardo reaffirms that good people can be seduced to do evil things due to the power of situation. This is the underlying meaning of the Lucifer effect that he uses to explain through this experiment: situational forces, along with obedience, make people conform their thinking and actions to do immoral things. This is how good people turn bad.