The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

I couldn't help but feel the lead of the Stanford Prison Experiment was a little too full of himself. He sees the experiment as one of the key pieces of research in our society. The book comes across as one big "humble-brag" as he tries to extract solutions to everything from the Stanford Prison Experiment.

A middle section describes the prison experience. In it, he had volunteers be "prisoners", while others were "guards". The prisoners were incarcerated full time for a week. The volunteers preferred to be prisoners because they thought that was something they were more likely to encounter in their lives. (There were plenty of student activists in the group.) During the studies, the guards inflicted extreme psychological cruelty on the prisoners. (So much so that he ended the experiment early) The conclusion that he drew was that given a situation, even good people can turn bad.

The book then rambles on for a long time trying to apply this to other parts of life. The prisoner abuse in Iraq gets a lot of attention. People with little training took out frustrations and abused prisoners. They were punished in part because they recorded it with photos and videos. 

I had the feeling that he was getting too broad in his conclusion. People do tend to play the role that they are put into. In the prison experiment, guards were encouraged to play their role. The prisoners also adopted their position, perhaps even too much. (He noted that they did not communicate with each other about their regular life.) He showed that when people are encouraged to play a role, they can do a good job at it.

He also proposes exposing people to "good situations" to encourage goodness, and lists a number of different types of "goodness". There is some logic to this argument, though it seemed to stretch things out. After all the book, the conclusion is "people are likely to adapt to the situation given."