In the preface of his book, Zimbardo reveals a number of justifications for why he carried out the Stanford Prison Experiment. A significant portion of his motivation for writing this work came from the Abu Ghraib Prison Trial when he served as an independent expert for Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick (Zimbardo x). The latter was a prison guard found guilty of the numerous tortures and killings of the captives that took place there. Such a context allows assuming that Zimbardo could be biased during his narration’s creation. He was directly involved in the experiment, which adds an exact extent of subjectivity to the author’s arguments.
The boundaries of one’s own power, contextual power, and systemic power should be understood in order to completely comprehend people’s behavior and prevent unwanted conduct. The modern culture treats wrongdoers as though they committed their crimes in a vacuum, free from contextual and systemic effects. Zimbardo recommends adopting a public health-style approach to resolving the issues of unwanted behavior by comprehending the circumstances that lead to individual actors committing crimes and correcting the environment in which such crimes are perpetrated. His primary purpose of writing the book was the justification of the latter idea. He gives several examples to illustrate his argument that a person may be persuaded to act evilly under the right circumstances. He even includes instances from his own youth, when he was raised in misery in the Bronx and saw his close friends fall victim to the “Banality of Evil” (Zimbardo xiii). Such an approach, again, is related to Zimbardo’s personal experience, which implies subjectivity and the related bias.
However, the readers can also be biased while reading the book. The theme is related to the theme of captivity, prison, and criminals. The public mind is considerably affected by the stereotypes about one who breaks the law and goes to jail. It is usually pre-assumed that such people are evil in nature, and their freedom should undoubtedly be limited. Nevertheless, not all of them are that bad – there are many cases of unintended crimes, mistakes within the justice system, and adverse effects of the environment in which they exist.
Work Cited
Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House, 2007. Internet Archive, Web.