The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

“I challenge the traditional focus on the individual’s inner nature, dispositions, personality traits, and character as the primary and often the sole target in understanding human failings. Instead, I argue that while most people are good most of the time, they can be readily seduced into engaging in what would normally qualify as ego-alien deeds, as antisocial, as destructive of others.”

The thesis of The Lucifer Effect argues that people are less in control and less responsible for their actions than society supposes. Zimbardo posits that people’s actions are dictated by the situations they occupy and that individuals’ behavior can radically change according to the circumstances in which they find themselves. An individual’s nature and value system, for example, are not enough to protect that individual from the potential to conform to the expectations of a new and unfamiliar setting.

“Upholding a Good-Evil dichotomy also takes ‘good people’ off the responsibility hook. They are freed from even considering their possible role in creating sustaining, perpetuating, or conceding to the conditions that contribute to delinquency, crime, vandalism, teasing, bullying, rape, torture, terror, and violence. ‘It’s the way of the world, and there’s not much that can be done to change it, certainly not by me.’” 

The theory of dispositionalism places the entire onus for societal ills and bad acts on individual actors. This theory is easy to accept because it relieves most people of the responsibility they might feel to do something to rectify the ills and the bad acts they observe in society. Zimbardo points out that societal ills will never be solved if they continue to be treated “dispositionally.” He believes that a situational and systemic approach, rather than a dispositional one, can improve society because it implicates all societal actors as agents of change instead of the mere few who have the potential to act badly.