Philip Zimbardo's Ted Talk: The Lucifer Effect

In Philip Zimbardo’s Ted Talk he discusses his book The Lucifer Effect and the psychology of evil. Zimbardo asks “what makes people go wrong?” It does not take much to turn a good person to a bad person. For most people it is like a light switch that can be turned on and off. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment by the name of The Stanford Prison Experiment. Students volunteered to be either be a prisoner or a prison guard for 2 weeks. Zimbardo was studying how the college boys would react and how their behavior would change even though they were separated by a coin flip. By the 3rd day the prison guards began to abuse the prisoners in a physically and sexually manner because they had the authority to do so. The Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq relates closely to Zimbardo’s experiment, because no one stepped in to stop the actions that were taking place soon enough.

The United States Military Police guards tortured suspected terrorists and innocent Iraqi men and women in cells. Prisoners of both the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib were tortured and humiliated by taking pictures of them with bags over their heads, making them wear degrading clothes or no clothes at all, and having them perform sexual simulations with each other such as sodomy and fallattio. Zimbardo says that, “They began to do degrading activities like having them simulate sodomy.” (Zimbardo,15:37). Prisoners in both of the experiments experienced mental breakdowns due to physical, emotional, and mental torture. The prison guards and the military police were given permission to have authority over the prisoners by a more powerful figure and started to abuse their authority to the point of no