Professor Philip Zimbardo, famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment in which students carefully screened for good mental health quickly turned into sadists in the assumed role of prison guard, admitted in a recent interview that his study proved that people with mental illness are immune to "The Lucifer Effect".
He said that although the general public and the Terrifying Advocacy Center believe that people with mental illness are more prone to evil actions than the non-mentally ill, analysis of his study proves the opposite to be the case. In fact, he found that he was not able to set up any experimental situation in which people diagnosed with psychiatric illness became bullies towards other volunteers nor did they break any rules of the social contract no matter how much they were pressured to do so by experimenters.
Zimbardo explained these results by theorizing that people with psychiatric illness are generally resistant to authority figures and stubbornly cling to old-fashioned ideals of chivalry and the golden rule. Zimbardo added that these results might lead to more effective treatments for the mentally ill so that they may fit in better with the general population
