The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

I had conducted research showing that research participants who were "deindividuated" more readily inflicted pain on others than did those who felt more individuated.'

What are other self-imposed prisons that limit our basic freedoms? Neurotic disorders, low self-esteem, shyness, prejudice, shame, and excessive fear of terrorism are just some of the chimeras that limit our potentiality for freedom and happiness, blinding our full appreciation of the world around us.!

Prisons are metaphors for constraints on freedom, both literal and symbolic.

conformity, obedience, deindividuation, dehumanization, moral disengagement, and the evil of inaction. "Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds," said President Franklin Roosevelt.

the power of situational forces over individual behavior.

If you put good people in a bad place, do the people triumph or does the place corrupt them? Would the violence that is endemic to most real prisons be absent in a prison filled with good middle-class

dynamics operating in the psychology of imprisonment.

Not only had I seen such events, I had been responsible for creating the conditions that allowed such abuses to flourish.

the power of dehumanization

the ease with which morality can be disengaged by the tactic of dehumanizing a potential victim.'