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Zimbardo narrates the whole narrative of the Stanford prison experiment, the seminal research in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly separated into "guards" and "inmates" and then placed in a mimic prison setting, for the first time and in detail. Zimbardo's work illuminates the psychological causes of such disturbing transformations, allowing us to better understand a wide range of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how oncehonorable American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. He substitutes the long-held notion of the "bad apple" with the "bad barrel"—the idea that the social environment and system infect the individual rather than the other way around. He claims that we are capable of rejecting evil and that we can even educate ourselves to act courageously. The Lucifer Effect, like Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, is a frightening, enthralling study that will revolutionize the way we understand human conduct.