If you want to change a person, you got to change the situation and to change the situation you have to know where the power is in the system.
How psychologists understand transformation of human character:
- Dispositional: inside of individuals – the bad apples
- Situational: external – the bad barrel
What Philip Zimbardo discovered that the root cause of bad or good behavior lies in:
3a The system: broad influence – political, economic, …
3b Legal power structures: the bad barrel makers
The lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. It is a dynamic play:
- What do people bring into the situation?
- What does the situation bring out of them?
- What is the system that creates and maintains that situation?
The lucifer effect is about how to understand how good people turn evil and a celebration of mind’s. The mind has an infinite capacity to make us behave:
- kind or cruel
- care of indifferent
- creative or destructive
- villains or heroes
Would you electrocute a stranger if someone asked you to?
The Stanley Milgram experiment and study is about individual authority to control people.
And the Lucifer Effect (based on the Stanford Prison Experiment) is about the study of the power of institutions.
It was 1 person who stopped the inhumane treatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison and is was 1 person who stopped the Stanford prison experiment.
Ordinary people, everyone, you and me! can be heroes and make positives differences every day. They act socio-centrically and not ego-centrically.
Did you make a positive difference today?!
