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Psychologist Philip Zimbardo discusses his book “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” at Google Headquarters in this hour-long video.

Publishers Weekly summarizes the book: “Psychologist Zimbardo masterminded the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates found themselves enacting sadistic abuse or abject submissiveness. In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right “situational” influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about “the banality of heroism,” with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.)”

In the video discussion below, he talks about how easily people are susceptible to evil given the right circumstances. He also delves into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal (some images are graphic).

“Do we take into account the system?” he asks of our legal sentencing when outside influences pressure people to commit evil. To what extent are the individuals guilty compared to those who are in charge of the system?

“What you are going to see is that evil begins as all evil begins — with a small first step,” he says before discussing how the Abu Ghraib abuses escalated.

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