Analysis of the Lucifer Effect

Whether we want to believe it or not there is evil in all of us. The mind thinks and controls our bodies in ways that we would never think possible until it happens. We laugh at racist jokes, gossip about others actions, cheat on tests, and on the larger note murder and rape other human beings. People think that a racist joke is harmless but what they do not realize is that that one joke could escalate to become dehumanizing a certain group of people. Whether it is on a small scale or a larger one, evil is still evil. I’ve learned on the journey I took through The Lucifer Effect that I do things because other people want me to do them and I want to be accepted by other people. Americans always claim that they want to be individuals. Conformity is not always a bad thing but it needs to be accepted. People want to be in the “in crowd”. Wanting to be in a certain group makes us agree to what they say and laugh at others who are not in our group. Conformity allows events such as hazing. The fact that people want to be in this certain group so badly means that sometimes we will do the unthinkable to make sure that we are in that group. The reason we do this is because of our normative and informational needs. Some groups cause us to just go with the flow when we know in our minds that the right thing to do is speak out and say when something is wrong. Do we always do that? No, because that would cause the group to possibly disagree and put us out of the group. The one thing that we do not remember is that the Nazis were once a small group too, but the things they did, which people thought were so small, became what we now know as the Holocaust. “It is only by becoming aware of our vulnerability to social pressure that we can begin resistance to conformity when it is not in our best interest to yield to the mentality of the herd”(256). We have to learn that one person can make a difference. If two people can cause a hung jury then we can make differences in our