The lucifer effect explains how good people become bad

Lucifer, according to Christian lore, was God's favorite angel who was punished and sent to hell for questioning God's authority and trying to turn other angels against God. Thus, he transformed from being the archangel to the devil. And according to Zimbardo, a psychology professor also the author of The Lucifer Effect, it is this metaphor which has inspired him to focus his research on transformations of human character not as dramatic as this one, in which ordinary, even good people begin to engage in bad deeds, for a short time or longer, that qualify as evil. The Lucifer Effect raises a fundamental question about the nature of human nature. How is it possible for ordinary, average, even good people to become perpetrators of evil? In trying to understand unusual or aberrant behavior, we often earn focusing exclusively on the inner determinants of genes, personality, and character, as we also tend to ignore what may be the critical catalyst for behavior change in the external situation, or in the system that creates and maintains such situations. As the old saying goes, show me your friends and I'll tell you who you are. We have teenagers struggle to fit in. They will wear the same outfits, hear the same songs, talk alike. All in the name of acceptance by the group. Adults are not different. They also join groups, see people with the same interests and obey a certain dress code. They tend to group together with people sharing the same moral values, social-economic status. The problem begins when those groups show their evil face. Protected by the group, individuals are capable of doing the most atrocious things. As Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political theorist said, the banality of evil is flabbergasting. In a research called the Stanford Prison Experiment, which was conducted by a research group led by Philip Zimbardo, college students were randomly assigned the role of prisoners or guards during two weeks. The guards were so engrossed by their role that they quickly started harassing, bullying and dehumanizing the prisoners. The experiment became so brutal and out of control that it was interrupted in less than five days. Explaining the plasticity of human nature, Zimbardo postulates that what we are is shaped both by the broad systems that govern our lives, wealth and poverty, geography and climate, historical epic, cultural, political and religious dominance, and by the specific situations we deal with daily. Those forces in turn interact with our basic biology and personality. His main point is that while individuals should be held responsible for their own conduct, we must also examine the situational and systemic factors that shape individual conduct. We must accept that there aren't just bad apples, but bad barrels, and in turn bad barrel makers. Zimbardo asserts that motives and needs that are generally positive can lead individuals astray when they are manipulated by social forces. The human need to belong, to be accepted by others, and for consistency between private attitudes and public behavior can pervert individuals' thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and actions. Peer pressure is a strong social force, but there is no peer pressure power without that push from self-pressure for them to want you. Concurrently, self-serving biases distance individuals from this reality and make them vulnerable to prevent them from working to avoid this behavior situational forces. He demonstrated how social psychology, even the most depressing studies of human weakness, can actually be inspiring. There will come a time in your life, he said, when, you have the power within you, as an ordinary person, as a person who is willing to take a decision, to blow the whistle, to take action, to go the other direction and do the heroic thing. That decision is set against the decisions to perpetrate evil or to do nothing, which is the evil of inaction. Zimbardo concluded with a thought from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian poet imprisoned under Stalin. The line between good and evil lies at the center of every human heart. So do you agree with Phil Zimbardo? Do you think a person's actions are hardly about his slash her individuality, but about the influence the system has on his slash her actions? So if your role changed from prisoner to prison guard or vice versa, would you still be the same person? Let us know in the comments.