LibGuides: True Crime Book Club: June 2023

About the Author: Philip G. Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo is perhaps best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department in 1971.
- participants in the study were 24 male college students who were randomly assigned to act either as "guards" or "prisoners" in the mock prison
- initially slated to last two weeks, but had to be terminated after just six days because of the extreme reactions and behaviors of the participants
- guards began displaying cruel and sadistic behavior toward the prisoners, while the prisoners became depressed and hopeless
born on March 23, 1933, in New York City
attended Brooklyn College where he earned a B.A. in 1954, triple majoring in psychology, sociology, and anthropology
went on to earn his M.A. in 1955 and his Ph.D. in 1959 from Yale University, both in psychology
taught briefly at Yale before becoming a psychology professor at New York University, where he taught until 1967
after a year of teaching at Columbia University, he became a faculty member at Stanford University in 1968
Since the prison experiment, Zimbardo has continued to conduct research on a variety of topics including shyness, cult behavior, and heroism.
In 2002, Zimbardo was elected president of the American Psychological Association
After more than 50 years of teaching, Zimbardo retired from Stanford in 2003 but gave his last "Exploring Human Nature" lecture on March 7, 2007.
he continues to work as the director of an organization he founded called the Heroic Imagination Project
- promotes research, education, and media initiatives designed to inspire ordinary people to act as heroes and agents of social change

Other Writings:

The Time Paradox

Shyness

The Shy Child

The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence

Philip G. Zimbardo on Writing the Book

“In this book, I summarize more than 30 years of research on factors that can create a "perfect storm" which leads good people to engage in evil actions. This transformation of human character is what I call the "Lucifer Effect," named after God's favorite angel, Lucifer, who fell from grace and ultimately became Satan. Rather than providing a religious analysis, however, I offer a psychological account of how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts.” (The Lucifer Effect)
"When I look back on it, I think, “Why didn’t you stop the cruelty earlier?” To stand back was contrary to my upbringing and nature. When I stood back as a noninterfering experimental scientist, I was, in a sense, as drawn into the power of the situation as any prisoners and guards." (The New York Times)

MLN Materials

book
spoken CD

Watch The Stanford Prison Experiment on DVD or Blu-ray!

Synopsis

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 inThe Lucifer Effecthe 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 Effectis a shocking, engrossing study that will change the way we view human behavior. From the Hardcover edition.

Discussion Questions

In one sentence, how would you describe The Lucifer Effect? What is this book about?
What did you know about the Stanford Prison Experiment before reading this book?
Why doesn't Zimbardo see humans as inherently good or evil?
What was the Stanford Prison Experiment? What was the original purpose of this experiment? What ended up happening? Why was Zimbardo forced to end the experiment early?
How did you feel while reading Zimbardo's in-depth day-by-day description of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Why do you think Zimbardo provided so much detail? Was this hard to read at times? Why? How does Zimbardo's approach to these events help you to process what you're reading?
How does Zimbardo connect the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment to real-world events outside of a controlled setting? What other research does he introduce or describe? How did you feel about all of this? What does it mean when it's all brought together?
How does this book approach the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib? What were the situational and systemic forces that led US military personnel to commit acts of torture? Who does Zimbardo ultimately blame for this? How do we balance blame between the people committing evil acts and the leaders who build the institutions and systems that encourage that behavior? What are your thoughts on this?
If this is a book about simulated and real torture, why doesn't it see people as inherently evil? Does this book end on a cynical or pessimistic note? How does Zimbardo introduce the concept of heroism? What did you think of this definition of a hero?
What police procedures are used during arrests, and how do these procedures lead people to feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized?
If you were a guard, what type of guard would you have become? How sure are you?
What prevented "good guards" from objecting to or countermanding orders from tough or bad guards?
If you were a prisoner, would you have been able to endure the experience? What would you have done differently than those subjects did? If you were imprisoned in a "real" prison for five years or more, could you take it?
Why did our prisoners try to work within the arbitrary prison system to effect a change in it (e.g., setting up a Grievance Committee), rather than trying to dismantle or change the system through outside help?
What factors would lead prisoners to attribute guard brutality to the guards' disposition or character, rather than to the situation?
What is "reality" in a prison setting? This study is one in which an illusion of imprisonment was created, but when do illusions become real?
Do you think that kids from an urban working-class environment would have broken down emotionally in the same way as middle-class prisoners? Why? What about women?
After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt when they saw each other in the same civilian clothes again and saw their prison reconverted to a basement laboratory hallway?
Was it ethical to do this study? Was it right to trade the suffering experienced by participants for the knowledge gained by the research?
How do the ethical dilemmas in this research compare with the ethical issues raised by Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments? Would it be better if these studies had never been done?
If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have done this study? Would you have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study?
How can we change our real institutions, such as Attica Prison, when they are designed to resist critical evaluation and operate in relative secrecy from taxpayers and legislators?
Knowing what this research says about the power of prison situations to have a corrosive effect on human nature, what recommendations would you make about changing the correctional system?

TV & Movies

Currently, the only authorized full-length film on the Stanford Prison Experiment is Quiet Rage (The Lucifer Effect)
Recently, however, Coup d'Etat Films has contracted to make a feature-length movie based on the experiment. Stanford University has granted permission to use the school's name and image, contingent upon the final script conveying the facts and events as they actually happened. (The Lucifer Effect)
- Crime Scene Pictures and Coup d'Etat Films are set to produce Christopher McQuarrie's upcoming feature project "The Stanford Prison Experiment." Set to shoot this fall, the movie is co-written by McQuarrie and Tim Talbott. McQuarrie produces alongside Coup d'Etat Films' Brent Emery and Crime Scene's Adam Ripp/Rob Paris. The movie will be shot partially on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California, as well as, outlying areas in California. (The Lucifer Effect)
"The Lucifer Effect" (2017) is also based on the experiment.
- The experiment was originally based on the 1971 "Stanford Prison Experiment" carried out by professor Philip Zimbardo to understand the development of norms and the effects of roles, labels, and social expectations in a simulated prison environment with some students of Standford University playing prisoners and others playing guards. Where Philip Zimbardo tested what happens when you put ordinary people in a position of power over others, Film Director; Tim Burke twisted the original experiment to answer a more supernatural hypothesis. In "The Lucifer Effect", Mr. Burke trapped 8 unsuspecting movie role contestants to test whether "good" people turn "bad" trapped in a reportedly evil environment. The film centers around 8 people, from all warps of life, who thought they had bought a 'movie role' in a horror film, only to be locked inside the haunted mental asylum to test the experiment. After signing release forms, the test subjects were locked inside for three days and three nights, with no phones and little food or water. The contestants were monitored on 24 CCTV cameras with no script or direction and just an Ouija board for comfort. Unlike other films it has been compared to, such as "The Blair Witch Project" or "Paranormal Activity"; the bizarre footage and horrifying events in "The Lucifer Effect" actually happened. As a result, the experiment was quickly shut down and police confiscated footage. Reports of a curse started to be reported in the media shortly after the contestants were released from the asylum and after the unfortunate events which happened at the film's test screening. (IMDB)

Fact vs Fiction: The Stanford Prison Experiment

The experiment was conducted in 1971 by psychologist Philip Zimbardo to examine situational forces versus dispositions in human behavior. (Simply Psychology)

24 young, healthy, psychologically normal men were randomly assigned to be “prisoners” or “guards” in a simulated prison environment. (Simply Psychology)

The experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days due to the extreme, pathological behavior emerging in both groups. The situational forces overwhelmed the dispositions of the participants. (Simply Psychology)

Pacifist young men assigned as guards began behaving sadistically, inflicting humiliation and suffering on the prisoners. Prisoners became blindly obedient and allowed themselves to be dehumanized. (Simply Psychology)

The principal investigator, Zimbardo, was also transformed into a rigid authority figure as the Prison Superintendent. (Simply Psychology)

The experiment demonstrated the power of situations to alter human behavior dramatically. Even good, normal people can do evil things when situational forces push them in that direction. (Simply Psychology)

Carried out August 15-21, 1971 in the basement of Jordan Hall, the Stanford Prison Experiment set out to examine the psychological effects of authority and powerlessness in a prison environment. The study, led by psychology professor Philip G. Zimbardo, recruited Stanford students using a local newspaper ad. (Stanford Prison Experiment)

The Nature of the Beast by David J. Anderson
Call Number: 152.4 Anderson
A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they're angry? You can't very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven't been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness. In The Nature of the Beast , pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem. He and his colleagues have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like fleeing a predator or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what studying emotions and related internal brain states in animals can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there's a link between aggression and mental illness. Full of fascinating stories, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions-and explains why we have them at all.
Emotional by Leonard Mlodinow
Call Number: 152.4 Mlodinow
We've all been told that thinking rationally is the key to success. But at the cutting edge of science, researchers are discovering that feeling is every bit as important as thinking in this "lively exposé of the growing consensus about the limited power of rationality and decision-making" ( The New York Times Book Review ). You make hundreds of decisions every day, from what to eat for breakfast to how you should invest, and not one of those decisions would be possible without emotion. It has long been said that thinking and feeling are separate and opposing forces in our behavior. But as Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of Subliminal, tells us, extraordinary advances in psychology and neuroscience have proven that emotions are as critical to our well-being as thinking. How can you connect better with others? How can you make sense of your frustration, fear, and anxiety? What can you do to live a happier life? The answers lie in understanding your emotions. Journeying from the labs of pioneering scientists to real-world scenarios that have flirted with disaster, Mlodinow shows us how our emotions can help, why they sometimes hurt, and what we can learn in both instances. Using deep insights into our evolution and biology, Mlodinow gives us the tools to understand our emotions better and to maximize their benefits. Told with his characteristic clarity and fascinating stories, Emotional explores the new science of feelings and offers us an essential guide to making the most of one of nature's greatest gifts.
Decisive by Chip Heath; Dan Heath
Call Number: 153.83 Heath
Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick , tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions. Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better? In Decisive , the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions. Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don t overlook precious opportunities to change our course? Decisive is the Heath brothers most powerful and important book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.
Just Babies by Paul Bloom
Call Number: 155.4 Bloom
A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone. From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society--and especially parents--to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies , Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others' actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice. Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race.
The Wisest One in the Room by Thomas Gilovich; Lee Ross
Call Number: 302 Gilovich
Renowned psychologists describe the most useful insights from social psychology that can help make you "wise": wise about why people behave the way they do, and wise about how to use that knowledge in understanding and influencing the people in your life. When faced with a challenge, we often turn to those we trust for words of wisdom. Friends, relatives, and colleagues: someone with the best advice about how to boost sales, the most useful insights into raising children, or the sharpest take on an ongoing conflict. In The Wisest One in the Room , renowned social psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross ask: Why? What do these people know? What are the foundations of their wisdom? And, as professors and researchers who specialize in the study of human behavior, they wonder: What general principles of human psychology are they drawing on to reach these conclusions? They begin by noting that wisdom, unlike intelligence, demands some insight into people--their hopes, fears, passions, and drives. It's true for the executive running a Fortune 500 company, the candidate seeking public office, the artist trying to create work that will speak to the ages, or the single parent trying to get a child through the tumultuous adolescent years. To be wise, they maintain, one must be psych-wise. Gilovich and Ross show that to answer any kind of behavioral question, it is essential to understand the details--especially the hidden and subtle details--of the situational forces acting upon us. Understanding these forces is the key to becoming wiser in the way we understand the people and events we encounter, and wiser in the way we deal with the challenges that are sure to come our way--perhaps even the key to becoming "the wisest in the room."
Digital Madness by Nicholas Kardaras
Call Number: 302.231 Kardaras
From the author of the provocative and influential Glow Kids , Digital Madness explores how we've become mad for our devices as our devices are driving us mad, as revolutionary research reveals technology's damaging effect on mental illness and suicide rates--and offers a way out. Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is at the forefront of psychologists sounding the alarm about the impact of excessive technology on younger brains. In Glow Kids , he described what screen time does to children, calling it "digital heroin". Now, in Digital Madness , Dr. Kardaras turns his attention to our teens and young adults and looks at the mental health impact of tech addiction and corrosive social media. In Digital Madness , Dr. Kardaras answers the question of why young people's mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. What's driving this mental health epidemic? Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion", spreading a variety of psychiatric disorders. The algorithm-fueled polarity of social media also shapes the brain's architecture into inherently pathological and reactive "black and white" thinking--toxic for politics and society, but also symptomatic of several mental disorders. Digital Madness also examines how the profit-driven titans of Big Tech have created our unhealthy tech-dependent lifestyle: sedentary, screen-staring, addicted, depressed, isolated and empty--all in the pursuit of increased engagement, data mining and monetization. But there is a solution. Dr. Kardaras offers a path out of our crisis, using examples from classical philosophy that encourage resilience, critical thinking and the pursuit of sanity-sustaining purpose in people's lives. Digital Madness is a crucial book for parents, educators, therapists, public health professionals, and policymakers who are searching for ways to restore our young people's mental and physical health.
Nobody's Normal by Roy Richard Grinker
Call Number: 305.908 Grinker
For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma-from the eighteenth century, through America's major wars, and into today's high-tech economy. Nobody's Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family's four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather's analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter's experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody's Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse
Call Number: 616.89 Nesse
A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness. Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick , Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals.
Evil by Julia Shaw
Call Number: 616.8582 Shaw
What is it about evil that we find so compelling? From our obsession with serial killers to violence in pop culture, we seem inescapably drawn to the stories of monstrous acts and the aberrant people who commit them. But evil, Dr. Julia Shaw argues, is all relative, rooted in our unique cultures. What one may consider normal, like sex before marriage, eating meat, or being a banker, others find abhorrent. And if evil is only in the eye of the beholder, can it be said to exist at all? In Evil , Shaw uses case studies from academia, examples from and popular culture, and anecdotes from everyday life to break down complex information and concepts like the neuroscience of evil, the psychology of bloodlust, and workplace misbehavior. This is a wide-ranging exploration into a fascinating, darkly compelling subject.