Here's an article from the Stanford Magazine that includes a bit of background on Zimbardo and an interview with him. Since he's been mentioned a time or two around these parts, I thought it might be of interest.

In a new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House), Zimbardo makes the case that “bad apples” aren’t to blame for evils at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: he argues that extreme situations and the systems that create them—“bad barrels”—lead ordinary people to behave in horrid ways.

On March 7, roughly coinciding with his golden teaching anniversary and the publication of the book, the psychology professor gave a farewell Stanford lecture. In the packed auditorium, the veteran showman’s presentation combined psychological research with real-world politics, leavened a heavy message with personal history and popular culture, and elicited both despair and optimism about human nature. The centerpiece: a series of snapshots from Abu Ghraib.

It’s easy to loathe the soldiers gloating over their atrocities—Zimbardo calls the photos “trophy shots,” likening them to fishermen’s poses with their big catch. But when Zimbardo describes the hellish, decrepit prison—in which the guards lived in conditions little better than those for the inmates—the soldiers’ actions gain new context. Under frequent attack by mortar fire, enveloped in desert heat and urine stench, the guards worked 12-hour shifts for weeks without respite, with insistent but vague orders to “soften up” for interrogation their prisoners of war.

 Amazon reviews of the book here.