ABSTRACT
Philip Zimbardo, author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, was born in 1933 in the South Bronx of New York City, an area he would later describe as "a ghetto". In 1959, Zimbardo completed his PhD in psychology at Yale University, joining the psychology faculty at Stanford University in California in 1968, where he has remained ever since. Zimbardo's core message in The Lucifer Effect is that situations can exert a great power over us. To illustrate this, he offers a detailed retelling and analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), a psychology study he designed and ran at Stanford University. While The Lucifer Effect includes a wealth of information on social psychology, research ethics, and many historical events, it is mainly important because of its in-depth investigation of Zimbardo's own SPE—now recognized as a seminal study in the field of psychology.
