Is Evil Born or Created? Understanding the Lucifer Effect.

In 1973, A psychologist named Phillip Zimbardo conducted an experiment in the basement of a Stanford university building, where he created a mock prison to study the psychological effects of prison life, and how authority and social expectations can influence behavior. He recruited 24 participants that were judged to be the most mentally stable, and least likely to have antisocial tendencies, from a pool of 70 applicants. Each participant was randomly assigned to either the prisoner role, or guard.

The prisoners were searched naked, given uniforms, assigned numbers, made to wear hair nets (as a substitute for a shaved head) and ankle chains. The goal of the experiment was not to create a literal prison, but to replicate the oppressiveness of such an environment.

Within the first few hours of the experiment, guards began to harass prisoners. They were verbally taunted, given orders, and humiliated. Push ups were used as a form of punishment.

On just the second day, the prisoners staged a rebellion. The guards retaliated by using the fire extinguisher, breaking into cells and stripping prisoners naked, and throwing the leaders into “solitary confinement”. Over the course of the experiment, the prisoners became more and more submissive, while the guards became more aggressive, increasing the level of humiliation forced upon the prisoners with things like making them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands.

In less than two days, the first prisoner had a mental breakdown and was allowed to leave the experiment.

In less than 6 days, multiple prisoners had breakdowns and the experiment was stopped.

The experiment quickly became known as one of the most unethical ones conducted, and proved how we all have the capacity for evil. Zimbardo proposes a situational perspective to evil behavior, saying that we live in an illusion of moral superiority not recognizing that we’re all capable of evil, if the circumstances demand it. Given just enough power and authority, anyone is capable of immoral things. He calls this the “Lucifer effect”, claiming that evil behavior is the result of the demands of certain situations, not the disposition of a person. He pushes the question of “what is responsible” instead of “who is responsible” for evil. He also uses this perspective to explain the incidents that occurred at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners of war were brutally tortured by “good” American soldiers.

Yet another unethical study that reaches the same conclusions about the capacity for evil in human behavior is Stanley Milgram’s blind obedience experiment, which is also referenced by Zimbardo quite a bit.

Milgram was interested in understanding the psychology behind the brutality in World War 2. He wanted to figure out how easily people could be influenced into doing something bad, and whether people would submission to authority could get people to do evil things, similar to the Holocaust.

He recruited participants to play the role of a “teacher”, who were paired with someone they believed was a “learner.” The teachers were told to administer electric shocks for wrong answers, gradually increasing the voltage. The learner was actually an actor receiving fake shocks and pretending to be in pain, but the participants didn’t know that.

Interestingly, whenever an authority figure was present (typically a lab coated researcher), many participants continued to deliver shocks even when the learner screamed in pain, protested, and pleaded to stop the experiment.

Despite their distress, 65% of the participants followed the authority figure’s instructions, going up to the 450 volts even when the learner went dead silent at 330 volts.

Considering that the learner could’ve been perceived to be dead, the fact that so many people continued to deliver higher shocks is terrifying. These are all perfectly normal, mentally stable people, that became capable of doing something horrible to someone, because of the demands of a situation. But surely the presence of an authority figure cannot be the only thing that pushes people to act so in such immoral ways.

So what is it that sends people down the slope of evil?

Moral disengagement is when immoral behavior is rationalized in a specific context.

Here’s what makes it easier for people to morally disengage -

Deindividuation : In many cultures, warriors change their appearance before going to war. They paint their faces, wear masks, wear uniforms etc. John Watson decided to evaluate 23 cultures to see if warriors who changed their appearance treated their victims differently. The results showed that 80% of warriors were more brutal. The loss of personal identity in these situations, allows people to do horrible things they wouldn’t otherwise. In both experiments, the line between personal identity and group identity was blurred.

Dehumanization : Robbing the victims of their personal identity (like assigning prisoners numbers, shaving their heads etc) facilitates their dehumanization. Stripping them of their humanity, makes it easier to perform atrocities against them. Albert Bandura conducted a study where a group of college students had to help train another group by delivering electric shocks to them. Before the study, the participants overheard the assistant (manipulated) either say “the students from the other school are nice” or “the students from the other school seem like animals”. The two groups of students had no direct contact. The results found that the participants that heard the animals statement, increased their shock levels over the trials.

Gradual exposure: In both the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram experiment, the “brutality” against another person was a gradual escalation, which allowed the participants to become exposed to their own immorality step by step, and slowly desensitized to the evil they were perpetrating.

Diffusion of responsibility : People are less likely to take responsibility for something when there are others present. A group of people doing the same bad thing creates a sense of normalization.

These are only a few factors, but they’re enough to transform the character of a person in a situation that demands evil. This understanding of immoral behavior also takes from the foundation of Hobbes philosophy, which basically suggests that in the absence of societal constraints, humans may engage in aggressive and self serving behavior.

Zimbardo believes that we live in a state of pluralistic ignorance, wrongly believing that we would never do the kind of evil things we’ve seen other people do. But unfortunately, we all have a capacity for evil that we keep suppressed. The only thing shielding us from its overt manifestation is our sense of morality, which is fragile enough to be altered in certain circumstances.