The Lucifer Effect

At the first World Congress on Positive Psychology in Philadelphia, I heard Philip Zimbardo talk last night about his work on the Lucifer Effect, the combination of factors that can cause ‘good people to engage in evil actions’. I thought it was fascinating, and very relevant for my ongoing thought process about ways to engage with systems of people.

Professor Zimbardo talks about the psychology of evil (and, later, its counterpart the psychology of heroism), but his greater frame is the ‘psychology of liberation’ – how much freedom do we really have, and why do we make the choices that we do? He has a system mindset, which I obviously like a lot. Rather than locating evil primarily within the individual, as we have mostly been trained to do, he talks about the complex interplay between dispositional psychology (‘bad apples’), the situation (‘bad barrels’) and the wider system (‘bad barrel-makers’). (Because of his previous work in this space, Zimbardo was asked to serve as an expert witness in defence of Chip Frederick, which has been the catalyst for much of his new work.)

Zimbardo identifies circumstances that lead to ‘the Lucifer effect’. Some of the key factors are:

Lack of oversight – photos from Abu Ghraib demonstrate how the night shift guards were left to themselves, knowing that there was no possibility of discovery by superior officers.

De-individualisation – soldiers lose sense of themselves through the assumption of uniform. They start to see themselves as part of a mass, rather than as individuals who are responsible for their own actions and can hold personal definitions of right and wrong.

Dehumanisation – this one is well known, I think. Soldiers (and others) start to see the enemy (or minority groups, or students playing prisoners) as less than human and therefore it becomes okay to treat them abusively.

Blind obedience to authority – Zimbardo was very interesting on the subject of the Milgram experiments. He talks about how the Milgram experiments carefully found ways for the authority figure to cut off any of the participants’ exit routes by counter-arguments to all their protests. He also shared some interesting results from some of the variants on the Milgram experiments, which again locate the discourse in the situation rather than the individual. In particular, 91% of participants administered shocks if they had previously seen a peer do so – the highest total figure – but only 12% did so if they had seen a peer rebel.

Mindlessly taking the first step – once the border between good and evil becomes permeated, the rest is a slippery slope. Zimbardo points out that the first shock in the Milgram experiments is a mere 15 volts and the first steps at both Abu Ghraib and Stanford involved getting prisoners to do push-ups.

Boredom – Chip Frederick worked twelve-hour night shifts seven days a week.

There are other factors, but these are the main ones that he discussed, I think.

I’m really happy that he talks about systems rather than individuals. It always seems clear to me that people behave differently in different contexts – there are situations that evoke heroism and situations that evoke the opposite. We’re not very good at studying systems, because it’s so hard to measure the answers. But we have to ask the questions anyway, because at least people are then talking about the right things at the right level.

Professor Zimbardo’s interventions are at the individual level – how can I become one of the 9% who doesn’t push the button, rather than one of the 91% who does? It’s a great question. But I am interested in a parallel question – what can we do to create a system in which that 9% number gets bigger and 91% shrinks? What types of intervention should one consider, and how might they be set up?

It is a difficult space because all my answers are speculative – I can’t prove any of them. But I found Zimbardo’s talk inspiring and thought-provoking, and I have a lot of notes for possible future posts in this space.