Walking through the corridors in the basement of building 420 in the Main Quad, it seems unremarkable. You’d never guess that, 36 years ago, terrible events unfolded within those walls, during what we now call the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE).

In his new book, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil,” Philip Zimbardo, the creator of the SPE, describes for the first time in incredible detail the events of the week-long experiment and applies the lessons learned to similar situations, such as the infamous Abu Ghraib scandal.

The book starts with a brief discussion of the nature of evil and how a situation can transform ordinary people into monsters (the so-called “banality of evil”); this is the focus of the book, which he expands upon extensively as the book progresses. Zimbardo then quickly moves into a narration of the events of the SPE, including its rationale and methodology. All of the participants were young, middle-class men who were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a mock prison, though every single participant said that if they had been given the choice, they would have chosen to be a prisoner (this was during the Vietnam War, and many expected to be arrested during protests).

The results of the experiment are well-known: the guards, especially those on the night shift, used any means possible to break the prisoners. The most common method was hour-long “counts,” in which the prisoners had to say their numbers any way the guards wanted, from counting by twos to singing, while any error (or no error at all) was cause for punishment, usually in the form of jumping jacks or push-ups. Counts happened at all hours of the day and exhausted the prisoners.

On the second day, there was essentially a riot, with some of the feistier prisoners actively fighting the guards. Because of this incident, the guards started to use some devious tactics, including taking away beds and clothes, running the prisoners’ blankets through sticker bushes — which left behind painful stickers that took hours to pick out — and culminating in degrading homoerotic acts similar to those at Abu Ghraib.

By the end of one week, several prisoners had gone home, one was on a hunger strike and the rest were utterly broken, just surviving hour by hour. The “bad guards” used the prisoners as toys, and the “good guards” did what little they could to help. It took Zimbardo’s girlfriend weeping at the plight of the prisoners for him to come to his senses and cut the experiment short.

The next section of the book discusses the implications of the SPE, along with other related research. The main conclusion is that situational forces are extremely powerful and can compel good people to evil actions. This is the heart of Zimbardo’s “bad barrels” metaphor: it’s not “bad apples,” but, rather, “bad barrels” that turn good people bad. Finally, he takes this large body of research and applies it to Abu Ghraib, putting leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld “on trial” for the situation they helped create, using inside information he acquired while testifying for one of the disgraced guards.

By the end of the book, Zimbardo is repeating himself quite a bit; the last chapters are the same arguments rehashed and repackaged. However, “The Lucifer Effect” is still a powerful book with an important message, and the details of the Stanford Prison Experiment are simply riveting. I highly recommend it and guarantee you will never see the basement of Jordan Hall the same way again.