What is a person capable of? Is it possible to develop a hero in yourself? The author of the famous prison experiment summarizes his research and asks new philosophical questions.
The famous psychologist again refers in this book to his most famous experiment: prison. The very same one, during which prosperous Stanford students, divided into «jailers» and «prisoners», in just a few days reproduced the worst examples of relations in prisons and discovered qualities in themselves that they did not know about and would prefer never to know. But The Lucifer Effect isn’t just the most detailed and compelling description of the XNUMX-year-old experiment. The past years have allowed Zimbardo himself to look at his work with different eyes, to move from a specific case to the most ambitious generalizations. Therefore, on the pages of the book, he asks sharp and deep questions. Who is more to blame for the torture in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison: the sadistic guards or President Bush? In what ways does a vicious social system encourage us to commit vicious acts? How to resist this pressure? And is it possible to raise a hero — in your family or in yourself?
Alpina non-fiction, 740 p.