---
product_id: 1702257
title: "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil"
price: "€ 38.84"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.fi/products/1702257-the-lucifer-effect-understanding-how-good-people-turn-evil
store_origin: FI
region: Finland
---

# The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

**Price:** € 38.84
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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil [Zimbardo, Philip] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Review: A must read to understand world powers. - I read this book several years ago and was enthralled. I ordered a couple more as gifts. It seems to resonate even more today than when I first read it. Evil can spread when nobody has enough courage to speak out and stand up.
Review: Read this if you wish to preserve your humanity... - This book, and another by Gabor Mate (In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts) should be mandatory reading for any and all with decision-making authority in the judicial system - particularly judges and prosecutors in the juvenile court system! For any person in a position of authority really, not just those in the legal system. So many lives are derailed or ruined because those with the power to surveil, label, control, and incarcerate are so fully under the spell of dispositional explanations of behavior, because they cannot fathom how situational pressures they themselves are not immune to can overwhelm and undue character, and because they stubbornly insist on remaining ignorant of their own vulnerability to, and complicity in creating and maintaining, a system that conceives of and legitimizes situations that lead ordinarily good people down the path to evil. Because I am convinced of the dangers inherent in relying on exclusively dispositional explanations for human behavior, because I am convinced that a great deal of unnecessary suffering can be attributed to this fallacious reasoning about causes, and because Dr. Zimbardo's book is such a compelling and captivating read, I teach The Lucifer Effect in my Introduction to Ethics course as a foil for traditional views of evil acts as arising strictly from a defective character (a failure to cultivate virtues of character or the abscence of a good will, for instance). It is not, as Zimbardo insists, that character does not matter, but rather that situations do. And dramatically so. Acknowledging this does not make ethics irrelevant and it does not doom human beings to a kind of situational determinism. Instead, accepting the role situations play in our conduct, for better and worse, is the necessary first step in the process of building characters that, while never immune to situational evil, are highly resistant to it. It is also the precursor to redesigning social institutions (systems) that construct situations which nurture and promote kindness, helpfulness, courage, and empathy to replace those which currently foster their opposites. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is troubled by the amount of misery and violence in societies worldwide, to those whose lives touch and shape the lives of children, prisoners, soldiers - oh, heck, for anyone who is not living in complete isolation from systems, situations, and other people. Basically, everyone should read this book!

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #21,251 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #46 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions #70 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions #564 in Personal Transformation Self-Help |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (2,674) |
| Dimensions  | 5.5 x 1.23 x 8.24 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 0812974441 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0812974447 |
| Item Weight  | 2.31 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 576 pages |
| Publication date  | January 22, 2008 |
| Publisher  | Random House Trade Paperbacks |

## Images

![The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71-oDsLSQYL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ A must read to understand world powers.
*by J***F on December 2, 2025*

I read this book several years ago and was enthralled. I ordered a couple more as gifts. It seems to resonate even more today than when I first read it. Evil can spread when nobody has enough courage to speak out and stand up.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Read this if you wish to preserve your humanity...
*by S***Y on October 27, 2014*

This book, and another by Gabor Mate (In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts) should be mandatory reading for any and all with decision-making authority in the judicial system - particularly judges and prosecutors in the juvenile court system! For any person in a position of authority really, not just those in the legal system. So many lives are derailed or ruined because those with the power to surveil, label, control, and incarcerate are so fully under the spell of dispositional explanations of behavior, because they cannot fathom how situational pressures they themselves are not immune to can overwhelm and undue character, and because they stubbornly insist on remaining ignorant of their own vulnerability to, and complicity in creating and maintaining, a system that conceives of and legitimizes situations that lead ordinarily good people down the path to evil. Because I am convinced of the dangers inherent in relying on exclusively dispositional explanations for human behavior, because I am convinced that a great deal of unnecessary suffering can be attributed to this fallacious reasoning about causes, and because Dr. Zimbardo's book is such a compelling and captivating read, I teach The Lucifer Effect in my Introduction to Ethics course as a foil for traditional views of evil acts as arising strictly from a defective character (a failure to cultivate virtues of character or the abscence of a good will, for instance). It is not, as Zimbardo insists, that character does not matter, but rather that situations do. And dramatically so. Acknowledging this does not make ethics irrelevant and it does not doom human beings to a kind of situational determinism. Instead, accepting the role situations play in our conduct, for better and worse, is the necessary first step in the process of building characters that, while never immune to situational evil, are highly resistant to it. It is also the precursor to redesigning social institutions (systems) that construct situations which nurture and promote kindness, helpfulness, courage, and empathy to replace those which currently foster their opposites. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is troubled by the amount of misery and violence in societies worldwide, to those whose lives touch and shape the lives of children, prisoners, soldiers - oh, heck, for anyone who is not living in complete isolation from systems, situations, and other people. Basically, everyone should read this book!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Worth Reading
*by L***X on September 1, 2025*

Zimbardo's point is that the problems in Abu Ghraib were largely the fault of military higher ups who were negligent but never held accountable for all of the torture and misconduct. He's correct but I stopped reading at page 400 because he goes on and on about it, hence four stars. The first half of the book about the Stanford Prison Experiment is interesting. Zimbardo is a bit on the left but he is one of the more insightful psychologists and he has a clear writing style.

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*Product available on Desertcart Finland*
*Store origin: FI*
*Last updated: 2026-02-05*