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1-Page Summary of The Lucifer Effect

Overview

The Bible tells the story of Lucifer, who was once God’s favorite angel. He challenged his authority and was punished by being sent to hell. There he became Satan, the personification of evil.

This is called the Lucifer Effect. It’s when good people turn bad under certain circumstances, like in war zones and tight-knit communities. We read about this every day. Even angels can be corrupted by their own desires or the situation around them. So how does it work? Does it just happen? This article will explain how a person becomes corrupt and what situations cause that corruption to occur.

The author explains the key points of his research, which includes how a US staff sergeant became an infamous sadist, the secret behind the Jonestown cult massacre, and how to resist evil and be a hero.

Big Idea #1: Anybody and everybody can turn into a perpetrator of evil.

Think of your life. Have you ever taken something that wasn’t yours when no one was looking? Most people have, and it’s not a big deal. We all make mistakes like this from time to time because we’re human.

And yet, we still believe that some people are born evil and others are born good. However, the truth is that the line separating good from evil is extremely thin.

For example, take the case of Ivan “Chip” Frederick. He was a staff sergeant in the US Army and one of the guards at Abu Ghraib prison. This gained worldwide attention for its abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners held there. Frederick wasn’t always this way; he was actually quite normal before his tenure at Abu Ghraib. But after working there, he became cruel and sadistic to those imprisoned there.

The modification of this change in behavior.

When people commit evil acts, we often assume that they are evil-natured. This is the same way that traditional psychiatry views mental illness.

Psychiatrists and psychologists believe that our behaviors are caused by inborn dispositions. It is believed that we carry these attributes with us throughout life, and they influence how we act. However, situational causes can be more influential than dispositional ones. For example: Frederick was born a sadistic monster but his behavior was influenced by the situation he found himself in – his father’s abuse of him as a child led to him becoming an abuser himself.

Frederick wasn’t born good or evil. He was actually a normal kid who turned evil through the influences of his environment and society.

Big Idea #2: Our personalities aren’t consistent; they change depending on the situation.

In addition to the common belief that some people are born good and others evil, most people think that personalities never change. This view of human behavior is easily put to rest with examples like how you behave around your closest friends versus young children. Why does it differ?

Your character and behavior depends on the situation you’re in. If you find yourself in a certain context or circumstance, your actions will be different than if you were in another one.

According to the situational approach, you are a different person depending on who you’re with. This was demonstrated by Milgram’s famous experiment in which people were told they were participating in an experiment about improving memory and had to shock someone if they made a mistake. The shocks became increasingly painful as time went on, but the actor playing the learner started screaming and refusing to answer questions at higher levels of pain.

Many teachers were reluctant to continue shocking the learners, but they did so because of a third party (the experimenter) who told them that it was part of the rules. If they didn’t follow orders, another person (the learner) would suffer. In total, 65 percent of participants continued shocking the learner beyond what was safe or humane!