LuciferEffect

Welcome to LuciferEffect.org, official web site of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007). 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. As part of this account, The Lucifer Effect tells, for the first time, the full story behind the Stanford Prison Experiment, a now-classic study I conducted in 1971. In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.
How and why did this transformation take place, and what does it tell us about recent events such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses in Iraq? Equally important, what does it say about the "nature of human nature," and what does it suggest about effective ways to prevent such abuses in the future?

Please join me in a journey that the poet Milton might describe as making “darkness visible.” Although it is often hard to read about evil up close and personal, we must understand its causes in order to contain and transform it through wise decisions and innovative communal actions. Indeed, in my view, there is no more urgent task that faces us today.
— Philip Zimbardo Professor Emeritus Stanford University

Easter

Stop it

stop bothering me, I am NOT going back. Am not going to start all over again, just to be smashed or stoped again. “You” got what yoy wanted, leave me alone. I am NOT starting all over again. Tears or feeling of loss won´t do the trick this time.

Days going by

still don´t understand what was misunderstood, you never told me or asked for clarification
But….. guess it does not matter anymore.

Recorded the first family video into the computer this morning. That was about time as the tape is about to be destroid. Most of the record was still ok, but some places it went blurry. Old tapes get sticky. L

This video was about my grandkids. When they was only 2 and not yet one year old in 1993-4. That was the times when things in life was important. How wonderful that was. Now nothing is, not really these tapes either, but it gets me something to do and my daughter and the kids will probably like to get a copy.

nonimportant importantnessesses, blä

now off to dads for some nonimportant meal

Zombie

What does it matter to live when nothing matters? Just doing things because one is supposed to do that or because the body needs it. How pointless! Just flesh and bones walking around pretending to live.

Notes

080301 -
Dreamt that Lil said she should move in two days and she had not even started packing or ordered a car. So, I had to do that.

080302 created a new Yahoo mailbox for chip

080305
Dreamed the old Scania dream. Rolf had tried to fix that terrain-map for tests that he had thought of a long time. Sadly the task had failed gravely. All hills and trees was distorted plastic stuff. So, it looked more like a garbage place.

That dream connects to what I have dreamt earlier. I felt like I become aware of the dream right in the middle of it. Like something wanted it to surface. Like when a scene fades in a movie.
My conclusion: I am that garbage forest site. So what??

The pull

It has started to pull again. This repeating pattern is getting tiresome. It is the same pattern with some variations.

This time I will not go back there. I refuse to do this all over again. There is nothing to gain. There is only this body, nothing else. When I die I will just be food for worms and the lawn in the cemetery. Nothing else and that is fine with me. That is how it shall be.