Is anybody here familiar with Phil Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect? It was published this year and it deals with a detailed analysis of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
It is a book 550 pages long. As I am reading it I cannot help but remember so many scenes from the whole cult experience. I wonder if anybody realizes that much of what transpired in those settings can be a very predictable result once certain factors are in place.
Zimbardo writes that it took him 30 years to details aspects of the SPE because what happened in that ONE week at Stanford haunted him for a long time and he could not get close to it. When he became an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib torture case he had to revisit the SPE because even though the settings were so different the patterns of behavior were predictably the same.
If one week at Stanford left such an indelible mark on what human beings are capable of, what does it take for 10,15,20-plus years cult survivors to talk or write about what happened there? We could substitute the name of a number of homes or combos to the Abu Ghraib setting and names of certain people in TF for the people indicted in the Abu Ghraib case. There are a number of permutations but no matter how the factors are changed the end result seems to be, invariably, power abuse and torture.
Has anybody looked at the book? I think any cult awareness site should link to it. It is some of the best work I have seen to date in the field of social psychology and group dynamics.
