What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it? Renow-ned social psychologist Philip Zimbardo has the answers, and in The Lucifer Effect he explains how---and the myriad reasons why---we are all susceptible to the lure of "the dark side." Drawing on examples from history as well as his own trailblazing.

Researcher, Zimbardo details how situational forces and group dynamics can work in concert to make monsters out of decent men and women. In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment in which 24 college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond just keeping the prisoners behind bars.

In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days.

For the first time, he tells the full story of this landmark study, in which a group of college-student volunteers was randomly divided into "guards" and "inmates" and then placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as ordinary college students were transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.

{youtube}rUyDznt5V4I{/youtube}

This event took place October 4, 2007 at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, CA

Read more: More information at www.lucifereffect.com As the United States enters the fifth year of its occupation of Iraq, some of the most enduring images of the war remain the vivid photographs of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.