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Sorry for my sporadic posting here lately. I’ve been posting regularly at NWI Connect and some of my other blogs, but prayeramedic has suffered some recently.
I’ve been selectively reading a great book for a research paper I’m writing. The book is entitled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (2007). Zimbardo conducted a prison simulation now popularly known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment he selected twenty-four college students, and randomly assigned half to be prisoners and the other half to be guards. Zimbardo simply wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. What he found stunned researchers throughout the halls of academia (and continues to do so today). His experiment, which was designed to last for two weeks, had to be ended after only six days due to the level of brutality that the guards had imposed against the prisoners and the level of psychological stress that the prisoners were experiencing. Remember that these were average college students who had no known predisposition to authoritarianism or violence. Both the prisoners and prison guards experienced what Zimbardo calls deindividuation, losing their sense of self. He also mentions that anonymity encouraged the guards to act in ways they might not have in a social environment.
In a great review on the book I found on Amazon.com, Reed Business Information wrote:
“In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right “situational” influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about ‘the banality of heroism,’ with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.) The author, who was an expert defense witness at the court-martial of an Abu Ghraib guard, argues against focusing on the dispositions of perpetrators of abuse; he insists that we blame the situation and the “system” that constructed it, and mounts an extended indictment of the architects of the Abu Ghraib system, including President Bush. Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world’s ills.“
I don’t have time right now to read the entire thing (the paper is due later this week), but from what I have read I’ve been very impressed. The book falls in the genres of social psychology, ethics, and philosophy. The important concept that I’d like you to ponder is that we are all capable of extraordinarily evil things. The Bible calls it original sin, psychology calls it dispositional or situational influences on behavior, but either way the bottom line is that we are capable of anything. The moment we begin to think that we could never commit various sins, we are in danger of believing that we are morally superior and thus somehow immune to situational influences of evil in our lives. I see far too many Christians who exude an attitude of moral superiority, I’ve been guilty of it myself. The problem is that when we maintain this attitude we begin to judge others more than sympathize for them.
Remember that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:15-16, New International Version).
