The Lucifer Effect

I was really fascinated by an interview I heard on the NPR show Fresh Air with Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is the Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, and he's perhaps best known for the so-called "Stanford Prison Experiment" in which seemingly n ormal college students were divided into two groups: prisoners and guards. In six days' time, Zimbardo had to stop the experiment, because the "guards" began to brutalize the prisoners. It raised the difficult question of why good people can in the right circumstances and with the right social reinforcement can end up doing unspeakable things.

Zimbardo has written a book called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. which is about the "Stanford Prison Experiment" and about him being called as an expert witness in the court martials of guards who were a part of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

I have a theological reason for wanting to understand what Zimbardo is writing and researching. In my attempts to understand human sinfulness--individually and collectively--I have come to believe that the traditional Protestant understandings of sin are in many ways inadequate to deal with questions like how could normal people go along with the Holocaust or a genocide in Rwanda or Darfur? How could normal Americans who function in society come to believe that sexually humiliating people or attaching electrodes to their testicles could be ever okay--not to mention that they took trophy pictures of themselves doing it?

For that matter, how can the majority of normal people in our country not be concerned that our government authorized torture and has yet to hold anyone higher than a low-level soldier accountable for it?

I guess I feel the traditional understanding of a sin as a bad action is simply inadequate to describe the level of violence that exists in our world. I also wonder if Zimbardo can shed any light from a psychological perspective on the idea that all of us our sinners--our Western individualism and humanism I feel masks the ways humanity in a macro or cosmic sense can inherently cooperate in acts that dehumanize others.

I haven't read the book yet or even bought it, but it's on my "TO BE READ" list.

Grace and Peace,

Chase