Lucifer’s Last Laugh: The Devil Is in the Details

Philip Zimbardo has studied human behavior in social situations for decades, and his efforts have given us some of the most memorable glimpses into the surprising possibilities of social behavior. Among these, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) has pride of place. Conducted in the basement of the psychology department over 6 days in 1971, the SPE has become one of the icons of situationism, or the idea that ordinary people can all too easily be induced to visit horrors on one another. Although the findings of the SPE originally were published outside the peerreviewed mainstream, they quickly became well known and widely disseminated in lecture halls. Then, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib scandal revealed human behavior that was eerily similar to behavior seen at Stanford, although some of it was much more vicious. Zimbardo testified on behalf of one of the accused prison guards, unsuccessfully pleading for a reduced sentence. In this book he offers his cumulative and evolving insights into the power of bad situations to corrupt ordinary people.