The definitive firsthand account of the groundbreaking research of Philip Zimbardothe basis for the awardwinning film The Stanford Prison Experiment Renowned social psychologist and creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment Philip Zimbardo explores the mechanisms that make good people do bad things how moral people can be seduced into acting immorally and what this says about the line separating good from evil. The Lucifer Effect explains howand the myriad reasons whywe 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. Here for the first time and in detail Zimbardo tells the full story of the Stanford Prison Experiment the landmark study in which a group of collegestudent 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 longheld notion of the bad apple with that of the bad barrelthe 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 Arendts Eichmann in Je