THE LUCIFER EFFECT: How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo

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Imagine a world in which doctors knew the underlying causes of many diseases and had a pretty good idea about most. They could cure many, alleviate more and were working on the rest.

But imagine, too, that in this world the media and politicians devoted their discourse to philtres and quackery. Scientific medicine, when mentioned at all, was presented as the preserve of bleeding-heart liberals, something that would never work. Unthinkable that we might live in such a world.

Now turn from medicine to human society. The social sciences (as important for the body politic as medicine is for the body physiological) are regularly passed over in favour of a monochrome absolutism as daft as any swivel-eyed fundamentalist babbling of the Devil.

Google “evil” – a word so empty that it should surely have withered away – and up come 136m hits in a third of a second. Tony Blair swore to confront evil wherever he found it. George W Bush would be lost without the word: his name is co-googled with it more than 2m times.

Both men – indeed all politicians and social commentators – should read this book by Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. Zimbardo’s central thesis is that evil is not just about those who inflict it, but the situations and systems that promote it. Take the scandal of the American guards-turned-torturers at Abu Ghraib. The standard line on the case (backed up by the guards’ trials) is that a few rotten apples can taint the whole barrel. In other words, the way to prevent future Abu Ghraibs is simple: when giving men and women absolute power over others, we should screen them carefully for the job. The alternative is embarrassing: serious misconduct, wholly unacceptable, few rotten apples, let down the regiment, steps taken, won’t happen again, mmph, dealt with, move on.

But Zimbardo knows better and can prove it. At the core of The Lucifer Effect lies a detailed reexamination of his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In the SPE, two dozen young men were paid $15 a day to take the roles of “prisoners” and “guards” in a mock jail in a Stanford faculty basement. Their roles were assigned on the toss of a coin. Within 48 hours, the “guards” were showing signs of sadistic bullying, and the “prisoners” of terrified, impotent submission. SPE, which was meant to last a fortnight, had to stop after six days, so out-of-control had it become.

SPE was designed to test the “situational” theory of social behaviour against the prevailing “dispositional” model. Dispositional thinking says, crudely, that character will out. Situational thinking says that we are more influenced by the conditions in which we find ourselves – a model that, Zimbardo suggests, can equally apply to acts of heroism. And just as the situational oversees the dispositional, so systemic factors influence situations. A bad system produces bad situations in which people act badly without even necessarily knowing why.

Social psychology has shown this time and again. And, time and again, authoritarian systems and those who run them have rejected the findings. Zimbardo testified to this effect on behalf of Staff Sgt Ivan “Chip” Frederick II, one of the Abu Ghraib defendants. The court martial rejected his testimony, as did Bush, who claimed Abu Ghraib was an aberration. Frederick – an army reservist, lowest of the low in the system – was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment and stripped of nine medals and 22 years’ retirement pay. Rotten apple. System fine. Bleeding hearts: dismissed.

Zimbardo extrapolates from the SPE into current social and political scenarios. Some of the work he cites is terrifying, such as the experiment in Palo Alto which showed that amiable high-school students in this liberal California town could, in days, be turned into something chillingly like Nazis, simply by changing their situation. He discusses Stanley Milgram’s experiments at Yale which showed that apparently moral individuals could be turned into killers given the right sort of authority figure. These make The Lucifer Effect unhappy reading for those who believe that we are, as individuals, morally autonomous.

It is when Zimbardo flips the coin, and suggests recipes for manufacturing resistance to (im)moral pressures, that the book becomes less convincing. His 10-Step programme for moral resistance is perhaps just too American for cynical British stomachs, focusing on step-by-step “moral goodness”, cranking up from writing a get-well card via taking orphans to the zoo to spending time talking to wounded veterans. We begin (he avers) by acknowledging our mistakes (hell, he’s lost Tony and Dubya at Step One, then) and end by refusing to “sacrifice personal or civic freedoms for the illusion of security” (ID cards, anyone?) and declaring that “I can oppose unjust systems”. The problem, of course, is that everyone has to do the same, or dissidents end up in prison.

The Lucifer Effect is an important book; if enough people absorbed its argument, we might find ourselves in a better polity. But, alas, we seem happier with scapegoats than explanations. When Condoleezza Rice says that Islamist extremists “are simply evil people” and that until “everybody in the world calls it by its name, the evil that it is . . . we’re going to have a problem”, she is not simply being stupid. She is working the system. And why not? The system has worked for her. It has worked for Bush. It has worked for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and the interests that support them. Nothing wrong with the system. Just a few rotten apples, that’s all. Just a few.

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