A review by niniane
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip G. Zimbardo

3.0

90% of this book is a detailed hour-by-hour transcription of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This was too detailed and also too painful for me to read. I stopped after a couple chapters, and skipped to the last chapter that contains a positive discussion about heroism and how to avoid falling prey to evil-inducing situations. The characterization of heroism was too clinical, and focused on technicalities of what constitutes the strict definition of a hero. Who cares whether Mother Theresa technically qualifies under definition A vs definition B? I just want to know how to make people behave more heroically. They had a few pages on this. Those pages were good, and I mostly skipped the rest of the book.