The irony of the Lucifer Effect

A light-hearted look at the psychology of evil

Philip Zimbardo wrote a book entitled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The premise of this book is that certain kinds of social situations have the power to turn otherwise good people into evil-doers. He calls this phenomenon "the Lucifer effect", a name which I consider rather ironic for reasons that will become clear. 

Zimbardo has long been an outspoken critic of "dispositionalist" explanations for behavior, which attribute a person’s actions and even their station in life to internal factors, such as their character traits, otherwise known as personality dispositions. In this naïve version of dispositionalism, good people do good things and bad people do bad things. Zimbardo disagrees with this view, and argues that situational factors external to the person are quite often much more important in explaining behavior than their personality. He argues that when it comes to evil-doing, most people want to blame the person without understanding the situational forces that have shaped their actions. He asserts that under certain circumstances:

People become transformed, just as the good angel, Lucifer, was transformed into the devil. Situations matter much more than most people realize or acknowledge.

William Blake's depiction of Satan tormenting Job - one hell of a situation for Job. 

He likes to uphold the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment as a demonstration of the power of an evil situation to corrupt otherwise nice, normal people into doing terrible things they otherwise would not do. He has also applied situational analyses to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, arguing that contrary to what the Pentagon and the military said, the guards who tortured and abused prisoners were not a few “bad apples” but were actually good people corrupted by an “evil barrel”, that is, a horrible situation in which systemic factors helped to create a culture in which people had little choice but to become abusers.

It’s not the bad apples, it’s the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that ‘little shop of horrors.’

'Little shop of horrors' indeed. Zimbardo might argue this woman was a good person turned evil by a corrupt situation. But what about her personal responsibility for her actions? 

I have written elsewhere about why I think that Zimbardo has created a false dichotomy between dispositional and situational explanations and I believe that he greatly overstates his case. (See this post for an alternative explanation of the Stanford Prison Experiment, and a further critique of situationism here and here.) But what I want to briefly highlight here is the irony of using the mythological Lucifer as an exemplar of the power of situations to turn good people evil as an alternative to a dispositional account.

Zimbardo briefly recaps the story of Lucifer in Chapter One of his book:

... the ultimate transformation of good into evil, the metamorphosis of Lucifer into Satan. Lucifer, the “light bearer,” was God’s favorite angel until he challenged God’s authority and was cast into Hell along with his band of fallen angels.

(He also provides a more detailed account of the traditional story of Lucifer on his web site.) Let’s consider the nature of this transformation. Why did Lucifer turn from good into evil? Was it because of external situational factors that put him under horrendous stress? Systematic forces over which he had no control that created a culture of abuse? No. According to the legend, Lucifer dwelt in Heaven with God. That is, he was in the purest, most perfect situation that can be conceived of, wanting for nothing in an eternally blissful place. His fall from grace is traditionally attributed to the sin of pride, of wanting to usurp the authority of God. A personality psychologist might describe him as narcissistic in the extreme. Therefore, his transformation was not due to external situational factors at all – unless one wants to accuse God of running a “little shop of horrors” – but due to his internal disposition towards pride. Therefore, the Lucifer Effect is ironically named after the most purely dispositional and non-situational account of evil that mythology can provide. For a situationist like Zimbardo, Lucifer is probably the worst example he could come up with of the effect that he is trying to illustrate. Perhaps a better name for the phenomenon of good people being turned into evil monsters by forces outside their control might be the "lycanthropy effect". There are popular legends of unfortunate people unlucky enough to be bitten or scratched by a werewolf who end up becoming werewolves themselves. Lucifer's transformation into Satan was self-willed, but in this version of the werewolf legend people who become werewolves are victims of circumstance rather than "bad apples" who make poor choices. 

 Perhaps the sequel could be called An American Werewolf in Abu Ghraib?

So a better explanation of the situationist view of evil might be explained thus:

People become transformed, just as innocent people bitten by a werewolf are turned into terrifying undead monsters, a process which has nothing to do with their personality dispositions or their personal choices.  

Admittedly, a more gruesome metaphor than the story of Lucifer, but hopefully one that is a better fit to an ideology of victimisation in which people are not to blame for their actions because the real causes lie outside themselves. 

For a more serious and scholarly review of Zimbardo's book, I would recommend Lucifer's Last Laugh: The Devil is in the Details by Joachim Krueger. 

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Cat and Dog people under attack! Cynicism and ignorance passing as science journalism

According to an unpublished study that has attracted attention recently, cat people are more intelligent than dog people. Details of the study and its findings are provided in this press release, and it has been widely reported on many websites, such as Time and Huffington Post. As the study has not yet been published, I cannot comment in any depth on its quality, but from what little I have seen so far, I would say that it seems sound enough in terms of its scientific rigour. However, science journalist Faye Flam, writing for Knight Science Journalism at MIT, begs to differ. In a piece titled Cat people smarter than dog people? Study should be a hoax, but probably isn't, Flam takes the position that the study is meaningless rubbish designed to get publicity, and that thinking people should not take it seriously. However, Flam's critique demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge or insight into the topic, lacks substance and seems to be little more than an exercise in cheap cynicism.

Differences in personality traits between people who describe themselves either as "cat people" or "dog people" have been researched in a number of academic studies. For example, one well-known study found that cat people differed from dog people in all of the Big Five personality traits, being lower in extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and higher in neuroticism and openness to experience. (I have discussed the implications of this particular study in an article on my blog on Psychology Today.) Another interesting and soon to be published paper on this topic looking at other personality traits can be viewed here. The study I focus on here, by Denise Guastello and colleagues, looked at yet another set of personality traits (Cattell's 16PF), and also appears to be the first study of its kind to examine whether cat and dog people differ in intelligence. The study surveyed 600 college students, and found that not only did cat and dog people differ on a variety of personality traits, in line with previous research, but that cat people scored higher than dog people in a measure of intelligence.

Although the details are somewhat sketchy, so far as I can tell, this seems like a valid research design with reasonable conclusions. Openness to experience is associated with intelligence and knowledge (e.g. see this article), and previous research has found that cat people are higher than dog people in this trait, so it does not seem all that surprising that they would be higher in intelligence as well. Of course, it is possible that the results found by Guastello and colleagues might turn out to be false positives or methodological artefacts, but in the absence of any evidence for this at this stage I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, Faye Flam seems inclined to be much more cynical than I am and goes on at some length about why she thinks the whole thing is a big joke. Unfortunately, she never provides any actual evidence why she thinks this is a reasonable position to take and shows considerable ignorance in the process.

Flam claims that there is a not so subtle formula one can use to whip up these kinds of studies that will grab international publicity. Apparently, doing substantive research that builds on existing knowledge does not enter into it, it's all about marketing I suppose. 

All you have to do is round up a few college students [Does 600 count as "a few"?], and divide them into two categories. It might be cat people vs. dog people, or baseball vs. soccer fans, or people who prefer fish tacos vs. those who prefer chicken tacos.

The implication here seems to be that the categories chosen by Guastello and colleagues for their study are actually arbitrary and meaningless in themselves, and chosen simply for being "cute." As I have noted, there is an existing body of literature - some of the relevant papers can even be found in a few seconds on google - that provides evidence supporting the validity of the concept of people self-identifying as cat or dog people, but Flam does not appear to have done even such a rudimentary search on the topic. She also fails to demonstrate that she knows anything at all about the literature on personality and intelligence testing.

Then give them some tests. Claim the tests reveal intelligence, or introversion/extroversion, or whatever seems sexy and attention-getting.

 Tests for assessing intelligence have been around for over a hundred years and have been intensively researched since then. Tests for assessing personality traits have been around for nearly as long and have also been intensively researched. The 16PF test that Guastello and colleagues used in their study was developed in the 1940s. Flam implies that such tests only "claim" to reveal these things, as if this is not really true, with the implication that they might as well be bogus and are only included so that one can generate some "sexy" but actually meaningless results. This completely ignores the thousands of research papers that have been written on the subject that show that these tests actually do measure meaningful aspects of behavior.

As long as the samples aren't really big, chance alone will ensure that the results will be slightly different. One group will always look a little smarter or more outgaining [sic, presumably she means "outgoing"] or whatever you claim you’re testing. If not, add more tests. That’s the nature of what scientists refer to as noise.

Well gosh darn it, if there was only some way of telling if group differences in test scores are nothing more than random chance fluctuations or real substantive differences! Oh wait a second, I just remembered there are these things called "statistical significance tests" that are designed exactly for this purpose. To be fair though, these tests are not perfect and it is true that if you perform multiple tests on the same sample some of the results might be statistically significant due to chance. Fortunately, there are procedures for correcting for multiple comparisons that are discussed in, oh I don't know, every basic statistics textbook ever. And what would Flam consider to be a "really big" sample size that would provide a valid test of whether or not the results are due to chance? There are statistical procedures for determining if a given sample size is adequate for the analyses being performed, but Flam does not say if she is aware of this or not.

Then assume your observed differences are not random noise but meaningful correlations and make up a story to explain it. The researchers in this case had a ready explanation for why the dog people were more “lively”…

 You mean the researchers actually attempted to provide an explanation for the results they observed?? Who do they think they are?? Oh, but wait a second, isn't this a normal part of science? Formulate a hypothesis, design a study to test it, analyse the results and then provide an explanation of what the results mean and whether or not they confirm the original hypothesis? I don't understand, what exactly is Flam's problem here? Here is the researcher's explanation that Flam quotes:

“It makes sense that a dog person is going to be more lively, because they're going to want to be out there, outside, talking to people, bringing their dog," Guastello said. "Whereas, if you're more introverted, and sensitive, maybe you're more at home reading a book, and your cat doesn't need to go outside for a walk.”

 Hmm, Guastello and colleagues gave some people who self-identified as cat people or dog people some well researched personality tests and the results indicated that they differed on the expected traits and then explain why they think this result makes sense. I fail to see what is so shockingly ridiculous or unscientific about this that Flam thinks the study deserves to be treated as some sort of hoax.

To be fair, Faye Flam does convey one nugget of real information that is worth noting.

Maybe the study was extremely carefully done, but there’s really no way to know. I can’t find a paper. It looks like it all started with a talk at a conference.

Flam is correct to point out that the study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal and what information is currently available derives from a conference presentation. Hence, news sites, such as Time and Huffington Post, that have hyped the results may be jumping the gun as it is impossible to assess the study’s rigour at this stage. If Flam had just pointed this out and left it at that I would not have a problem. However, there is no justification for what amounts to a cynical and uninformed accusation that the research study was performed in an academically shoddy manner simply to gain attention, an accusation based on no evidence whatsoever. Flam waits until near the end of her critique to acknowledge that for all she knows the study might be a very good one. Since she has no evidence that the study is actually a bad one, then what justification does she have for such an extreme lack of charity to the authors?

I would think that "science journalism" should attempt to provide an informed and thoughtful discussion of scientific issues, but what we have here is nothing but crud bereft of substance or insight. "Science dismissal" would be a more apt term for it.

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