In the penultimate chapter of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Christopher Browning references Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment as evidence of the psychological explanation of how “ordinary” people can end up doing monstrous or unthinkable things. Browning, studying the actions of a reserve police battalion during the Second World War, concluded that the “most relevant” part of Zimbardo’s study “is the spectrum of behavior that [he] discovered in his sample of eleven guards” (Browning, 168). The range of conduct that Zimbardo observed among the prison guards in his experiment closely aligns with the ways that members of the police battalion responded to and took part in the genocide of Jews during the Nazi regime.

Zimbardo has written a new book that elaborates the moral dimensions of his experiment from 1971, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. As the New York Times interview with him reveals, Zimbardo sees his past and present work as a way of understanding how individuals are capable of evil.

Dr. Zimbardo, a social psychologist and the past president of the American Psychological Association, has made his reputation studying how people disguise the good and bad in themselves and under what conditions either is expressed.

His Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, known as the S.P.E. in social science textbooks, showed how anonymity, conformity and boredom can be used to induce sadistic behavior in otherwise wholesome students. More recently, Dr. Zimbardo, 74, has been studying how policy decisions and individual choices led to abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The road that took him from Stanford to Abu Ghraib is described in his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil”

The complete article from the New York Times, “Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil”