Do you still remember the ideals you started out with? Have you ever worried that one day you might betray them?
This article sets out to explore one question: how exactly do people who once held lofty ideals slide, step by step, into becoming monsters?
Let's begin with a few facts. As a young man, Mao Zedong was an idealist — a youth committed to advancing Marxism in China. The Mao of those days was deeply opposed to dictatorship, and he wrote many essays denouncing the one-party rule of the Kuomintang government of the time. Pol Pot studied social work at university. Lin Cheng-yueh read sociology during his university years and once took part in social movements, trying to change society's injustices through the methods of protest. So why, in the end, did these figures become what we see today?
Psychology holds that the power of the situation has an enormous influence on people. The Lucifer Effect is the most classic shorthand for this — the idea of how a good person turns into a monster. This time, we want to share with you the Stanford Prison Experiment — a classic study conducted by Philip Zimbardo.
The Origin of the Lucifer Effect
As the story goes, Lucifer was created by God — the most powerful and most beloved of all the angels. But one day, Lucifer was struck by a sudden thought: "Why does God rank higher than me?" And so he led a third of the angels in heaven in revolt, attempting to overthrow God. In the end he naturally did not succeed, and was instead punished by God and cast down to hell, becoming the figure we now call Satan. So "Lucifer" became the byword for those who were once angels and later turned into monsters.
When it comes to the Lucifer Effect, there is one classic psychology experiment we cannot leave out.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment was conducted by the last-century psychologist Philip Zimbardo. He first invited a large group of students studying at Stanford University and ran psychological tests on them, confirming that their mental and emotional states were healthy and normal. He then randomly assigned the students into two groups: guards and prisoners. The students assigned to be guards were instructed to maintain "order" within the "prison" — to make sure the prisoners behaved obediently and caused no trouble; the prisoner group, meanwhile, simply had to be prisoners.
This experiment was funded by the United States Navy, so it was very well resourced. When the experiment began, the "prisoners" were arrested at their doors by people playing police officers and taken by "police car" to the prison; the whole process was extremely realistic.
On the first day of the experiment, both sides got along without incident, because everyone was still in the mindset of taking part in an experiment. But the situation took a sharp turn for the worse in a very short time: the prisoners felt they had committed no crime at all, so why should they be imprisoned and treated like inmates? This kind of thinking arose largely because the "prison" of the time had been set up to be completely indistinguishable from a real one; the only difference was that participants could "break out" at any time — they were free to choose to withdraw from the experiment. This is a rule of every psychology study: participants always retain the final right to choose to withdraw of their own accord.
The Overwhelming Power of the Situation
Placed in such a realistic prison situation, the participants gradually began to forget their original identities, and both sides played their roles with complete commitment. On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners began to rebel — tearing off their prisoner labels and refusing to follow the guards' orders. At this point, the guards received instructions to maintain order in the prison by any means within their power, and they began to engage in some harsh behaviour: humiliating the prisoners in every way, forcing them to do push-ups, even mimicking the conditions of a real prison — disregarding the prisoners' dignity, ordering them to squat down and addressing them by their prisoner numbers. Later, the situation inside the prison spiralled further out of control. Some guards had developed a taste for cruelty, mentally abusing the prisoners without let-up; and the prisoners, in turn, became submissive, as though they had already accepted that they were genuine prisoners. It was as if everyone had forgotten that they were in fact fellow classmates, ordinary university students who simply happened to take part in this experiment and put on different roles. Their psychological states changed very quickly and very greatly: the guards became extremely brutal and merciless, with no regard whatsoever for the prisoners' plight; while the prisoners fell into a kind of despair, trying to escape, but the pressure applied by the guards was greater than the force of their resistance, leaving their mental states deteriorating by the day. Philip Zimbardo, who led the study, also became deeply absorbed in it, convinced that the experiment could yield rich results, so it never even occurred to him to halt it. But one female PhD student, who possessed a great deal of empathy, told Philip Zimbardo plainly that the participants' condition had become very bad and that they might not be able to hold out any longer. And so the experiment ran for only six days before it was suspended. This empathetic female PhD student ultimately became Philip Zimbardo's wife — a celebrated tale in the psychology world of the time.
The Lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment
This classic experiment offers us quite a few lessons. For example, if someone asked you, "Do you think you are the same kind of person as a corrupt cop?", most readers would surely deny it without a moment's hesitation, insisting that they would be ashamed to be counted among the shameless and the conscienceless. By the same logic, when you are asked whether — had you been a participant in the Stanford Prison Experiment — you would have become a numb, unfeeling guard, or a meekly submissive prisoner, most people would say they absolutely would not, because "I'm different from them". But, as countless psychology experiments have found time and again, when you are placed in the situation of the moment, the choices you can make are extremely limited. The author will not deny that there must be a few individual exceptions — Nelson Mandela, for instance, who was imprisoned for as long as thirty years yet still held firm in advancing the human rights of South Africa's black population. But these are the rarest of cases. Under normal circumstances we are all people of conscience, but when a person is placed in a situation that treats conscience as worthless, we are very easily reshaped; and holding on to one's original ideals is an extremely difficult thing — far harder than you might imagine.
Change From Within the System
In other words, people are seeds of conscience, but this seed must be nurtured in suitable soil if it is to grow strong. If the external environment is less than ideal, this tender seedling is easily crushed. From this we can see that an individual's power is extremely limited. Take, for example, today's Hong Kong police force, which is entirely unchecked by any other power — as the saying goes, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely". This too is what is so terrifying about power that is not held in check. This experiment reveals that, in order to keep in check those who have been granted power, a sound and effective social system is absolutely essential.
I still remember that back in 2014, quite a few young people declared on all the major discussion forums: after the Umbrella Revolution, I'll go and sit the exam to join the police force! Hoping to bring about change from within the system. To this day, if these young people followed through and joined the police, who knows how they are doing now? Would they have become one of those clad in riot gear? The power of the system to change a person is absolutely greater than you imagine. Some will say they hope to put on the riot gear and become the "good cops" within the riot police; but in truth, when you try to change or to resist the power that this riot uniform grants you, you may, without even realising it, be the one who gets changed.
Dehumanisation
"All it takes is a label." Pin a label on the other party, dehumanise them, and you can come to regard them as a non-human species. Just like the participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment: they were originally an ordinary group of university students, but the moment the labels of "prisoner" and "guard" were attached to them, they decided they had a different mission. Because the order Philip Zimbardo handed down was precisely this: the guards must use every means to maintain order in the prison. Does this sound familiar? It could be said to be the very state of Hong Kong society today. The Hong Kong government has devolved power to the police force, giving the police boundless power to abuse resources in maintaining the "social order" they envisage. The labelled group, in keeping with the mission they have been granted, do their utmost to achieve their aim, because this label represents their identity.
In addition, people who live within an Enmeshed Society are comparatively easy to manipulate, and so come to commit acts that are dehumanising and that, to an outside observer, appear utterly absurd. An Enmeshed Society refers to a group of people who have little contact with the outside world, spend long periods together, and find it hard to establish connections beyond their own circle. The Hong Kong police force is a good example of an Enmeshed Society: most people in society are repelled by them, so it is very hard for them to build relationships with people on the outside. The only thing they can do is "huddle round the fire for warmth" — within the same system, doing the same absurd things, saying the same preposterous words, building up an echo chamber, endlessly repeating their unreasonable behaviour and entrenching their thinking, so that they can rationalise their own actions. These techniques are extremely common in the police, in the military, and even in brainwashing programmes.
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The Historical Lessons of the Lucifer Effect
From the above we can see that the power of human nature is very fragile, and that if a goal is to be achieved, the power of the situation is an extremely important link in the chain. For example, someone might ask: then why don't the undercover officers the police send into the triads turn? The reason is that these undercover officers still maintain a close connection with the force, and are constantly reminded of their "true identity". But on the other hand, those good young people who set out to become "good cops" did not belong to any organisation at all, and in the absence of a strong situational force, even the strongest individual will gets dispersed by the torrent of an Enmeshed Society, gradually forgetting their original intentions and becoming one of those swayed by the Lucifer Effect.
The reason a just social system is so important is that we have already learned from the Stanford Prison Experiment that the environment exerts a great influence on people. If we can draw lessons from the Lucifer Effect, and even work it in reverse — building a good environment so that everyone's behaviour benefits society — then we believe we can, step by step, move towards a more ideal society.
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