The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

The Stanford Prison Experiment created an ecology of dehumanization, just as real prisons do, in a host of direct, constantly repeated messages. It started with the loss of freedom and extended to the loss of privacy and finally to the loss of personal identity. It separated inmates from their past, their community, and their families and substituted for their normal reality a current reality that forced them to live with other prisoners in an anonymous cell with virtually no personal space. External, coercive rules and arbitrary decisions by guards dictated their behavior. More subtly, in our prison, as in all prisons I know about, emotions were suppressed, inhibited, and distorted. Tender, caring emotions were absent among both guards and prisoners after only a few days

"I made them call each other names and clean toilets out with their bare hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle, and I kept thinking I have to watch out for them in case they try something."

Within some caring professions, such as clinical psychology, social work, and medicine, this process is called "detached concern." The actor is put into the paradoxical position of having to dehumanize clients in order to better assist or cure them." Dehumanization typically facilitates abusive and destructive actions toward those so objectified.

human qualities that these "others" share with us are diminished or are erased from our awareness. This is accomplished by the psychological mechanisms of intellectualization, denial, and the isolation of affect. In contrast to human relationships, which are subjective, personal, and emotional, dehumanized relationships are objectifying, analytical, and empty of emotional or empathic content

One of the worst things that we can do to our fellow human beings is deprive them of their humanity, render them worthless by exercising the psychological process of dehumanization. This occurs when the "others" are thought not to possess the same feelings, thoughts, values, and purposes in life that we do.

group of ordinary pupils proved the "Pygmalion Effect" by becoming what they were expected to be — academically outstanding. Sadly, the opposite is likely to occur even more frequently when teachers expect poor performance from certain kinds of pupils — from minority backgrounds or in some classes even from male students. Teachers then unconsciously treat them in ways that validate those negative stereotypes, and those students performing less well than they are capable.

Cognitive Dissonance That Rationalizes Evil An interesting consequence of playing a role publicly that is contrary to one's private beliefs is the creation of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive Dissonance That Rationalizes Evil An interesting consequence of playing a role publicly that is contrary to one's private beliefs is the creation of cognitive dissonance

Feelings dominate reason, and action dominates reflection.

The parents not only accepted our show of the prison situation as benign and interesting rather than hostile and destructive, but they allowed us to impose a set of arbitrary rules on them, as we had done to their children, to constrain their behavior. We counted on their playing the embedded roles of conforming, law-abiding, middle-class citizens who respect authority and rarely challenge the system directly. Similarly, we knew that our middle-class prisoners were unlikely to jump the guards directly even when they were desperate and outnumbered them by as much as nine to two, when a guard was off the Yard. Such violence was not part of their learned role behavior, as it might have been with lower-class participants, who would be more likely to take matters into their own hands. There was not even evidence that the prisoners even fantasized such physical attacks. The reality of any role depends on the support system that demands it and keeps it in bounds, not allowing alternate reality to intrude