BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

This best-selling book by the creator of the famous "Stanford Experiment" shows that we are all capable of evil.

Environments create the context in which evil can occur.

Directly contrary to the Bush simplisitic mantra that there are evil people who have to be destroyed, it is "leaders" like Osama, Bush, Stalin, Cheney, Hitler, and Rumsfeld who have created environments that "nurture" and encourage evil.

As his publisher, Random House, writes: "By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”–the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically. Like Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Lucifer Effect is a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior."

BuzzFlash draws the conclusion that we should be emphasizing how the Busheviks created a culture of evil in the name of trying to Biblically -- and futilely --eliminate "evil" people.

Whether one agrees with the detention of the British military personnel (now released) or not, it is clear that they were treated more humanely than the Bush administration treated anyone that has gotten in their way overseas.

In such a context, who are the purveyors of evil?

Zimbardo's book gains its strength in that he grounds his theory in the results of research, not just philosophical speculation.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Psychologist Zimbardo masterminded the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates found themselves enacting sadistic abuse or abject submissiveness. In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about "the banality of heroism," with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.) The author, who was an expert defense witness at the court-martial of an Abu Ghraib guard, argues against focusing on the dispositions of perpetrators of abuse; he insists that we blame the situation and the "system" that constructed it, and mounts an extended indictment of the architects of the Abu Ghraib system, including President Bush. Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world's ills."

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS