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Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect

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1. The Lucifer Effect is concocted Zimbardo is mainly about why “good” people turn “evil” or do horrifying things. The term evil means “behaving in a manner that harms, dehumanizes or demeans innocent others” (Zimbardo 146) the theory discusses whether humans are naturally evil (fixed) or is it their environment that fuels them to do things that are not in their nature. Zimbardo acknowledges that the very top creates the environments that manage the system who deflect the evil on to others to disregard their hand in creating the environment.
2. Through his concept of the Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo emphasizes the parallels between his earlier work on the Stanford Prison and horrors at Abu Ghraib Prison (and crimes against humanity). What are …show more content…

The parallels between the Stanford Prison and Abu Ghirab Prison are strong because in both cases because in both cases, people were being humiliated, degraded and dehumanized. Zimbaro explain that in his experiment the scenes from the Abu Ghirab Prison were “interchangeable”. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, healthy men who had clean backgrounds participated in the experiment ad ended up behaving in a way that they themselves could not predict. The similarities also occurred in the Ghirab Prison when the members of the military who lacked a criminal record, and passed the military psychological tests were now found guilty of “dehumanizing, demeaning, innocent” others in a manner that we know as “evil”. For example, when the US soldiers who were seen as good members dehumanized the Arab civilians, the environment had othered them in their minds like what occurred in the video of the Stanford Experiment when the student who became a guard mentioned that he had to speak to himself and think of the prisoners as inferior. For the US guards to treat the civilians so terribly, they must have been dehumanized in their minds. Zimbardo explains that the behavior is easily done when an environment and enemy is created and points out that it is often time media does this through images and propaganda. In the second part of the essay, he mentions that certain behaviors. I do agree with most of what Zimbardo says but I do not believe that all people might find themselves behaving

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