I found this book just amazing. I learnt so much about how conditions with bad rules as well as no rules with no accountability will encourage a very large majority of people, sometimes as much as 90% of people, to commit acts of evil. This totally shocked me.
The reason why I bought this book is that I started to work in a very repressive environment. I had never worked in such an environment before, and I could not understand why, as in previous places I was able to pin such a negative vibe on an individual. At this place I could not. It seemed to me that the system was at play, but no-one was trying to challenge it.
This book answered that question - almost all people will comply or enforce negative behaviours. Very senior management, who set the tone and the rules, will also let the negative behaviour occur and do nothing. Very very few people will ever challenge it. And the reason for this : people want to belong and they fear rejection. If they challenge the norms there is a high emotional cost to pay : exactly what happened to me. In a matter of weeks I went from being a confident person to utter depression as I so detested the environment. The last chapter was the saving grace and has enabled me to know how we can work to make working environments better. Thank you Phil.
I have four criticisms having read this book:
1. Having read it I seem to trust psychologists less : they seem to create scientific experiments where by volunteers are duped into them, for example they provide adverts to come to an experiment. The advert does not set out what will happen in the experiment.
2. The psychological experiments are always evil. Phil in his last chapter comes up with a thought experiment of doing a good positive behaviour experiment, stating that such a one has not been done.
3. Phil regularly states that the individuals who committed crimes cannot be excused for their crimes. But he never elaborates on this. On the one hand he spends 98% of the book explaining that the conditions caused the bad behaviour, and then 2% (or less) stating that they were responsible for the bad behaviour. For me I want to know why at the end of day do human beings commit evil acts in such bad conditions. Is Phil saying that at the end of the day we are puppets, 100% manipulated by our environment? Or is he saying we are manipulated by say 99% of our environment and that there is 1% within each individual person to choose good or evil? In my heart I believe we are able to choose, and we must learn to choose to find that 1% to do good, and perhaps we can start growing that 1% to 2% to 10% and so on, the maximum I do not know though. Would groups of nuns do the same? Would Jesus and the 12 disciples have done the same?
4. I worry if the social construct of psychology research is to fund evil experiments. I shall keep detached from the research. At one point I was considering studying psychology, but would be concerned that after a while I would end up being manipulated into their social construct.
I have now bought Phil's next book : The Time Paradox, and look forward to writing my next review of it