
The Lucifer Effect
Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
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Narrated by:
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Kevin Foley
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By:
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Philip Zimbardo
About this listen
What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it? Renowned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The Lucifer Effect
Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing research, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. Zimbardo is perhaps best known as the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Here, for the first time and in detail, he tells the full story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into guards and inmates and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week, the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the "bad apple" with the "bad barrel" - the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.
This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically.
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Critic reviews
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Overall
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Performance
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By: Philip Zimbardo, and others
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-
-
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Overall
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In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects—or “teachers”—were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human “learner,” with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences.
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Good content, but poor narrative experience
- By Anonymous User on 06-11-25
By: Stanley Milgram
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Opening Skinner's Box
- Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
- By: Lauren Slater
- Narrated by: Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Lauren Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.
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Great book, robotic reader
- By Eva on 08-29-17
By: Lauren Slater
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Survival Theory II
- The Psychology of Human Desperation, Starvation, and Living Without Rule of Law
- By: Jonathan Hollerman
- Narrated by: Eric Cunningham
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is not a 10-step plan to survive the zombie apocalypse, or a survival guide for natural disasters. It is a discussion on human psychology and physiology, and the threats posed by starvation psychosis during a prolonged, total collapse scenario.
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YOU SHOULD CONSULT AN EXPERT (LIKE ME)
- By Day on 09-21-24
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Leadership in War
- Essential Lessons from Those Who Made History
- By: Andrew Roberts
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Taking us from the French Revolution to the Cold War, Andrew Roberts presents us with a bracingly honest and deeply insightful look at nine major figures in modern history: Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Margaret Thatcher. Each one of these leaders fundamentally shaped the outcome of the war in which their nation was embroiled.
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Fantastic
- By Amazon Customer on 01-15-20
By: Andrew Roberts
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The Psychopath Whisperer
- The Science of Those Without Conscience
- By: Kent A. Kiehl
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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We know of psychopaths from chilling headlines and stories in the news and movies - from Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy to Hannibal Lecter and Dexter Morgan. As Dr. Kent Kiehl shows, psychopaths can be identified by a checklist of symptoms that includes pathological lying; lack of empathy, guilt, and remorse; grandiose sense of self-worth; manipulation; and failure to accept one’s actions. But why do psychopaths behave the way they do? Is it the result of their environment - how they were raised - or is there a genetic component to their lack of conscience?
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An autobiography with splatter of neuropsychology.
- By DORIS H. on 08-16-14
By: Kent A. Kiehl
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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In Sheep's Clothing
- Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People
- By: George K. Simon
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. George K. Simon knows how people push your buttons: your children---especially teens---are experts at it, as is your mate. A coworker may quietly undermine your efforts while professing to be helpful, or your boss may prey on your weaknesses. Manipulative people have two goals: to win and to look good doing it.
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Don't Be A Sucker
- By constructivefeedback on 02-07-12
By: George K. Simon
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The Origins and History of Consciousness
- Bollingen Series
- By: Erich Neumann, R. F. C. Hull - translator, Carl Jung - foreword
- Narrated by: William Roberts
- Length: 17 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent.
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My Boi JP was right
- By Anonymous User on 12-27-20
By: Erich Neumann, and others
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The Psychopath Test
- A Journey Through the Madness Industry
- By: Jon Ronson
- Narrated by: Jon Ronson
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power.
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Painfully out of dated
- By Heather Wagner on 06-24-23
By: Jon Ronson
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Tracers in the Dark
- The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
- By: Andy Greenberg
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money.
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Could not put this down
- By Mike Reaves on 01-28-23
By: Andy Greenberg
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Dangerous Personalities
- An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
- By: Joe Navarro, Toni Sciarra Poynter
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In Dangerous Personalities, former FBI profiler Joe Navarro shows listeners how to identify the four most common "dangerous personalities", and analyze how much of a threat each one can be: the Narcissist, the Predator, the Paranoid, and the Unstable Personality. Along the way, listeners learn how to protect themselves both immediately and long-term - as well as how to recover from the trauma of being close to such a destructive force.
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A Bad Conscience
- By Mel on 10-29-14
By: Joe Navarro, and others
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Snakes in Suits, Revised Edition
- Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office
- By: Paul Babiak PhD, Robert D. Hare PhD
- Narrated by: Todd McLaren
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In Snakes in Suits, Hare, an expert on the scientific study of psychopathy, and Babiak, an industrial and organizational psychologist and a leading authority on the corporate psychopath, examine the role of psychopaths in modern corporations and provide the tools employers can use to avoid and deal with them. Together, they have developed the B-Scan 360, a research tool designed specifically for business professionals.
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The Book flip flops from great to unbearable
- By ricodiva on 03-15-22
By: Paul Babiak PhD, and others
The stories
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Paradigm shifted!
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I think everyone should listen to this at somepoint. It will help to make you into a bettet person that understands yourself better!
Everyone should listen to this at some point!
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The first part of the book is a summary of the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment the author admits to not having kept clear control of the people in the experiment. In fact, I would say that there were incidents that he describes where he encouraged the decadent behavior, by having the leader tell "guards" (students acting as guards) to be more guard-like.
One of my questions from this experiment is how much the preconceived ideas of the students and the professor fed in to the results. There is validity to the results, as can be seen from Andersonville and the Northern prison referenced make.
In the later half of the book he moves on to Abu Grab. I must say, if I knew that this was the real focus of this book I probably would not have bought it. I did find some of the insights helpful, however this was marred by his ignorance of the military and his desire to use this as an attack against the Bush administration.
Because it is an audible book, I cannot remember all of the inaccuracies -- but here are some that I remember:
Firstly the rendition program was created by President Clinton. It was used by Bush.
Secondly his understanding of the NCOIC and his evaluations is inaccurate. the author was highly impressed with the list of medals of this soldier. As I listened to the list, it was a "normal" list for anyone who had been enlisted for 12 years (give or take) The National Defense Service Ribbon is given simply for being part of the military during a time of war, others are regular parts of the service. That is why military people call them "candy". The NCO in question had evaluations that were not impressive. If the author would have read any of the manuals on writing NCOERs he would have been less impressed.
Thirdly, he places the lack of training on the Bush administration. I see another fault. During VietNam it was decided that all PW (prisoner of War) units would be from the reserves, as a way to keep us from being part of a war that did not have public support. The unforeseen consequences of that is a less trained...less disciplined force in those positions.
I should note that I have had some exposure to a few prisons (not major, but some exposure), having worked at the US Army Retraining Brigade, the USDB (Leavenworth), and various county jails (I am a pastor). These are places of disproportionate power, but the best of them set up systems of checks and balances. Obviously there were major problems in Abu Grab -- what I would refer to as command and control issues, as well as staffing, cleanliness, etc. I would also wonder about the wisdom of using one of the worst prisons from Sadaam.
The author's interest in using this as a forum to attack the Bush administration is easily seen from his admission that the rest of the book he would be acting as prosecutor. This was the last 1/4 of the book. Again, this is not what I bought this book for.
I wonder if he would like to turn this kind of analysis to the inhumanity of taking away the dignity of work, the slavery of the welfare system, the inhumanity of bureaucracy in government, and the results of other liberal "ideals".
Again, not the book that I thought I was getting, but I did appreciate the exposure to social psychology.
His apologetic for self and attack of the Bush Adm
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One of the most important books ever written.
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What did you like best about The Lucifer Effect? What did you like least?
I liked the title, it pulled me in.What was most disappointing about Philip Zimbardo’s story?
It was to clinical for me it was a long way to the point.What aspect of Kevin Foley’s performance would you have changed?
It was OKGet to the Point
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It is an amazing look into social/peer pressure to conform, destructive changes that can come from anonymity, and how some people can act like monsters and still go home at night if it’s just a role in their head.
I have no idea how this isn’t taught in high school more.
Absolutely Mind-blowing!
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A mildly entertaining forever
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Useful insight, Great narration
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Some missing parts of tape
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