Zimbardo

The premise of this book is that otherwise good (or at least not actively bad) people can do bad, indeed evil things and that this can be explained by the situation in which the acts took place. In 1971 Zimbardo conducted the "Stanford prison experiment" in which students enacted the roles of prison guards and prisoners - the results so traumatised Zimbardo that supposedly he never gave the experiment the complete write-up he intended to. Many years later he acted as an expert witness for the defense of one of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. It was this experience and his frustration with organisations who still explain wrongdoing as being the work of a "few bad apples" rather than a "bad system" that caused him to write this book.
Just under half the book (chapters 2-9, 192 pages) is a description of the Stanford Prison Experiment, followed by another two chapters of reflection on the events during the experiment. There is now a website dedicated to the Stanford Prison Experiment at prisonexp.org so I won’t give a detailed summary of the experiment here. Suffice it to say that from a group of young male volunteers some were chosen at random to act as prison guards and the rest to act as prisoners in a pretend prison in the psychology department basement. The experiment had been due to last two weeks but Zimbardo abandoned it on the tenth day because of the worsening treatment of the "prisoners" by the "guards."
Chapters 12 (Investigating Social Dynamics: Power, Conformity and Obedience) and 13 (Investigating Social Dynamics: Deindividuation, Dehumanisation and the Evil of Inaction) are the most interesting chapters as they give several short summaries of various experiments and events that show how people can be persuaded to do things that they would normally insist that they would never do.
Chapter 14 describes Zimbardo’s experience as an expert witness at the court martial of one of the soldiers involved in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse