Comments by Tom Maddux on how Phillip Zimbardo's latest book, The Lucifer Effect, sheds light on Assembly leadership, plus a review on Amazon.com.
Tom Maddux: The other day I was in the Buena Park library. As I looked over the
shelf of new books, I spotted the name Phillip Zimbardo on the book,
The Lucifer Effect. My interest was
piqued immediately.
As I have done more reading on cults and mind control in the past few
years the name Phillip Zimbardo has come up many times. He has been the
president of the American Psychological Association, a researcher in his
field as a college professor Stanford University, and an author of several books.
In 1971 he conducted an experiment at Stanford. A group of typical
college students was selected, then divided into two sub-groups. One
group was designated "guards", and the other was designated,
"prisoners". The subjects were then placed in a facility where their
conduct was monitored constantly by cameras.
The guards quickly became abusive, and then the prisoners became
rebellious, and then depressed. The experiment was supposed to run for
two weeks. After one week the monitors became so alarmed that they
called it off! What had happened was that there was a prison rebellion
with barricaded doors and attempts to break them down. When interviewed,
the "guards" testified that they had rapidly come to hate the prisoners,
and vice versa.
In this book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo uses what was learned in this experiment to shed
light on many incidents in history including the Abu Ghraib prison
abuse scandal. He concludes that in just about any group of people there
are factors present in human personalities that can be activated by
placing the person in the right conditions.
I think that this goes a long way to explain the way the Assembly
leadership developed and behaved, as well as the response of those
subject to their influence. Increasing abusiveness producing rebellion,
("I'm outa here"), and depression, ("I wish I were outa here but I can't
bring myself to make the break"), followed by depression caused illness.
By showing that these possibilities are present in all of us, it seems
to me that Zimbardo has unintentionally shed light on the question of
how Christians can do such things. We do not shed human nature the day
we are born again. So the right conditions can trigger these tendencies
unless we "have our senses exercised to discern good and evil" and the
spiritual strength to exercise enough courage to stand against the
crowd.
Amazon.com editorial review of Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect:
What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to
act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is
in danger of crossing it?
Renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The
Lucifer Effect he explains how–and the myriad reasons why–we are all
susceptible to the lure of “the dark side.” Drawing on examples from
history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how
situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make
monsters out of decent men and women.
Zimbardo is perhaps best known as the creator of the Stanford Prison
Experiment. Here, for the first time and in detail, he tells the full
story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student
volunteers was randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and then
placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was
abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either
brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.
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.
Philip Zimbardo is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford
University and has also taught at Yale University, New York University,
and Columbia University. He is the co-author of Psychology and Life and
author of Shyness, which together have sold more than 2.5 million
copies. Zimbardo has been president of the American Psychological
Association and is now director of the Stanford Center on
Interdisciplinary Policy, Education, and Research on Terrorism. He also
narrated the award-winning PBS series Discovering Psychology, which he
helped create. In 2004, he acted as an expert witness in the
court-martial hearings of one of the American army reservists accused of
criminal behavior in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His informative
website, www.prisonexperiment.org is visited by millions every year.
Visit the author’s personal website at www.zimbardo.com.