The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

The insights gleaned from analyzing systemic/situational forces on behavior can be utilized to prevent or curb evil. Humans possess a duality of detachment versus saturation, suspicion versus engagement. Humans are skeptical yet engaging. The challenge is to oscillate between the two, realizing when to engage and when to distance oneself. No one is invulnerable to systemic and situational forces, though persons often have an illusion of such. This illusion permits the mental conditions which allow individuals to be overtaken by such powerful forces.

Research supports a reverse-Milgram altruism effect. Such effect involves three influence tactics: the foot-in-the door tactic, social modeling, and self-labeling of helpfulness. Research has shown use of these tactics can promote prosocial behavior. The foot-in-the-door tactic is enhanced when chained as a series of increasingly larger requests. Social models work via the traditional adage of ‘practice what you preach,’ demonstrating positive behavior as virtuous and desirable. Studies of children have shown that they are far more likely to replicate observed behavior than preaching. Research on self-labeling has similarly shown that giving “someone an identity label of the kind that you would like them to have as someone who will then do the action you want to elicit from them” (451).