The Lucifer Effect

If prison is anything like what I went through here, I don't know how it could help anyone. (pg 162)

The System includes the Situation, but it is more enduring, more widespread, involving extensive networks of people, their expectations, norms, policies, and, perhaps, laws. Over time, Systems come to have a historical foundation and sometimes also a political and economic power structure that governs and directs the behaviour of many people within its sphere of influence.

Systems are the engines that run situations that create behavioural contexts that influence the human action of those under their control. At some point, the System may become an autonomous entity, independent of those who initially started it or even of those in apparent authority within its power structure. Each System comes to develop a culture of its own, as many Systems collectively come to contribute to the culture of a society. (pg 179-180)

The line between Good and Evil, once thought to be impermeable, proved instead to be quite permeable. (pg 195)

The primary simple lesson the Stanford Prison Experiment teaches is that situations matter. Social situations can have more profound effects on the behaviour and mental functioning of individuals, groups, and national leaders than we might believe possible. Some situations can exert such powerful influence over us that we can be led to behave in ways we would not, could not, predict was possible in advance. (pg 211-212)

The most important lesson to be derived from the Stanford Prison Experiment is that Situations are created by Systems. Systems provide the institutional support, authority, and resources that allow Situations to operate as they do. (pg 226)

You get confessions and admissions by building rapport not by bullying, by earning trust not by fostering hatred. (pg 377)

By developing a balanced time perspective in which past, present, and future can be called into action depending on the situation and task at hand, you will be in a better position to act responsibly and wisely than when your time perspective is biased toward reliance on only one or two time frames. Situational power is weakened when past and future combine to contain the excesses of the present.

For example, research indicates that righteous Gentiles who helped to hide Dutch Jews from the Nazis did not engage in the kind of rationalising their neighbours did in generating reasons for not helping. These heroes depended upon moral structures derived from their past and never lost sight of a future time when they would look back on this terrible situation and be forced to ask themselves whether they had done the right thing when they chose not to succumb to fear and social pressure. (pg 455)

- Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.

"These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

"And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect." - Hebrews 11:1-2, 13, 39-40 (ESV)