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Reading List · What Drives PeopleThe Best Books About Why Good People Do Bad Things
Most harm is not done by monsters. It is done by people who follow orders, go along with the group, keep quiet to protect a job, or tell themselves a story in which they are still the good guy. Psychologists, historians and novelists have spent decades asking how that happens: why obedience and conformity are so strong, how people rationalise what they have done, and what situations make cruelty feel normal. These books try to answer that question honestly.
The list mixes non-fiction and fiction. The non-fiction covers obedience experiments, Holocaust history, self-justification and moral psychology, plus two investigations into people who went along with fraud and murder. The novels show the same forces from the inside: a group of boys, a village ritual, a camp guard, a loyal butler and a child whose lie changes three lives.
Thirteen books about Why Good People Do Bad Things
Ordinary Men
Christopher R. Browning · 1992
A history of Reserve Police Battalion 101, about 500 mostly middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg. Drawing on postwar interrogations, Browning traces how they went from the massacre at Józefów in 1942, where about 1,500 Jews were shot, to the deaths of tens of thousands more. When their commander offered to excuse anyone who did not want to take part, only about a dozen stepped forward.
Browning concludes that the men killed mainly out of obedience to authority and pressure from their peers, partly drawing on Milgram’s experiments. He also shows that not all of them were committed antisemites. It is one of the most cited case studies of how ordinary people become perpetrators.
Read it if you want the clearest historical case study of ordinary people becoming killers.
Obedience to Authority
Stanley Milgram · 1974
Milgram’s own account of the obedience experiments he ran at Yale between 1961 and 1965. Volunteers were told to give what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person. In the baseline version, 65 per cent continued to the maximum 450 volts. The book sets out his methods, the many variations he tested and his explanation of the results.
The variations are the point: obedience fell when the authority figure was absent, when the victim was close by, or when someone else refused first. Milgram places the cause in the situation rather than in personality, which makes this the starting text for the psychology of following orders.
Read it if you want to read the original obedience experiments rather than a summary of them.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Hannah Arendt · 1963
Arendt reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, and her articles became this book. She argued that Eichmann was neither a fanatic nor a sociopath but a careerist bureaucrat who spoke in clichés and cared more about promotion than ideology. Her phrase for this, the banality of evil, describes the man, not the scale of his crimes.
The book remains contested. Critics objected to its tone, to its account of the Jewish councils, and later historians such as Bettina Stangneth and David Cesarani challenged her picture of Eichmann. Read alongside Ordinary Men, it raises the question of how much thoughtlessness, rather than hatred, makes mass harm possible.
Read it if you want the book behind the phrase ’the banality of evil’, and the debate around it.
The Lucifer Effect
Philip Zimbardo · 2007
Zimbardo, who designed the Stanford Prison Experiment, revisits the study in which students assigned as guards or prisoners became abusive or submissive. He then applies its lessons to the abuses by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib. His central claim is that almost anyone, under the right pressures, can abandon moral restraint. The book ends with a chapter on heroism and resisting those pressures.
Zimbardo blames situations and the systems that create them more than individual perpetrators. Read it critically: the Stanford Prison Experiment has long been questioned on ethical grounds, and critics such as Erich Fromm noted that not every guard behaved sadistically, which weakens the claim that bad situations turn people into monsters.
Read it if you want the situational argument in its strongest form, and are willing to weigh its critics.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson · 2007
Two social psychologists explain why people find it so hard to admit that a belief or action was wrong. The answer is cognitive dissonance: to escape the discomfort of conflicting ideas, people justify past choices instead of learning from them. The book follows this through false memories, false confessions, politics and the justification of war and torture.
Where other books on this list ask how people start doing harm, this one asks why they keep going. It shows how self-deception can turn small steps into entrenched positions, and how perpetrators and victims tell very different stories about the same events.
Read it if you want to understand how people rationalise harm they have done and stay convinced they are good.
The Righteous Mind
Jonathan Haidt · 2012
Subtitled Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, the book argues that moral judgements come mainly from intuition, with reasoning following afterwards to justify them. Haidt’s image is an elephant (intuition) and its rider (reason), who believes he is steering. He sets out several moral foundations, from care and fairness to loyalty, authority and sanctity.
It is less about atrocity than about everyday moral certainty. Haidt describes people as groupish and righteous, quick to dismiss other viewpoints, which helps explain how people can feel entirely justified while treating others badly. Critics argue his framework can be used to excuse self-interest.
Read it if you want to understand how moral certainty and group loyalty shape what people think is right.
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou · 2018
The story of Theranos, the blood-testing start-up led by Elizabeth Holmes, which claimed it could run a wide range of tests from a finger-prick sample. It grew out of Carreyrou’s Wall Street Journal investigation, which began in 2015, and won the 2018 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Carreyrou has said the fraud was committed chiefly by two people and a small circle of enablers, while a culture of intimidation and fear kept staff quiet. The book shows how secrecy, prestige and well-known backers allowed it to go on, and what it took for whistleblowers such as Tyler Shultz and Erika Cheung to speak up.
Read it if you want a modern, workplace-sized look at how people go along with wrongdoing, and what it costs to refuse.
Read my full recommendation →Killers of the Flower Moon
David Grann · 2017
In the early 1920s, after oil was found beneath their land, wealthy Osage people in Oklahoma were murdered one after another. Grann reconstructs the killings, the investigation by the young FBI and the conviction of cattleman William King Hale as the mastermind. Officially at least 20 people died; Grann suspects many more were killed.
The murders depended on more than one man. Under the law, white guardians controlled much Osage wealth, and local officials looked away. The story shows greed and complicity spreading through a whole community. Martin Scorsese’s 2023 film focuses on Ernest Burkhart, who married into an Osage family while his uncle arranged their deaths.
Read it if you want to see how ordinary greed and silence across a community made murder possible.
Read my full recommendation →Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
Golding’s debut novel strands a group of British schoolboys on an uninhabited island after a plane crash. Ralph is elected chief and calls meetings with a conch shell, Piggy offers reason, and Jack leads the hunters. As fear of an imagined beast grows, order breaks down, the group splits, and two boys are killed.
Often read as an allegory about the violence within human nature, the novel is also a study of groupthink: how fear, ritual and a charismatic leader pull ordinary children into acts none of them would have planned alone. It is a natural fiction partner to the obedience and conformity research above.
Read it if you want the classic novel about how quickly a group can turn on its own.
Read my full recommendation →The Lottery
Shirley Jackson · 1948
In a small American village, residents gather for an annual lottery said to ensure a good harvest. Families draw slips from a black box, then one member of the chosen family draws again. The ending, withheld until the last moment, reveals what the winner faces. The story appeared in The New Yorker in June 1948.
Jackson said she wanted to shock readers into recognising the pointless violence and inhumanity in their own lives. Its subject is blind adherence to tradition: neighbours take part in cruelty simply because it has always been done. The response was huge, with many readers writing in to ask where such lotteries took place.
Read it if you want a short, sharp story about tradition and conformity that you can read in one sitting.
Read my full recommendation →The Reader
Bernhard Schlink · 1995
At 15, Michael Berg has an affair with Hanna Schmitz, an older tram conductor. Years later, as a law student, he watches her stand trial as a former SS guard at a camp where hundreds of Jewish women died in a church fire. Hanna hides that she cannot read, and Michael keeps a secret that could change her sentence.
The novel asks how a person Michael loved could have taken part in such crimes, and what the next generation of Germans owes to the truth. First published in German, it was translated by Carol Brown Janeway, chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999 and filmed in 2008 with Kate Winslet.
Read it if you want a novel about loving someone who did terrible things, and the guilt that passes to the next generation.
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989
In 1956, Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, sets out on a motoring trip and looks back on decades of service to Lord Darlington, who hosted secret meetings with German officials before the war. Stevens insists his employer was honourable. The novel won the 1989 Booker Prize and was filmed in 1993.
Stevens is a decent man by his own standards, and that is the problem. At Darlington’s instruction he dismisses two Jewish housemaids, and his idea of professional dignity lets him avoid asking what he served. It is a quiet study of complicity through loyalty, duty and not looking closely.
Read it if you want a quiet novel about how duty and loyalty can make a decent man complicit.
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2001
In 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis, an aspiring writer, misreads what she sees between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, the housekeeper’s son, and then falsely accuses Robbie of a crime. He goes to prison. The novel follows them into the Second World War. It was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize and filmed in 2007.
Briony is not malicious; she is certain she is right. The novel shows how imagination, pride and the adults’ readiness to believe her combine into lasting harm, and how she spends her life trying to make amends. It is the most personal take on the theme in this list.
Read it if you want a novel about how a well-meaning person can cause lasting harm, and whether it can ever be undone.
Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For the history of ordinary perpetrators — Ordinary Men by Christopher R. Browning (1992)
- For the psychology of obedience — Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram (1974)
- For how people justify what they did — Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (2007)
- For a modern workplace story — Bad Blood by John Carreyrou (2018)
- For a short read — The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948)
- For a novel about quiet complicity — The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
Why do good people do bad things?
Research on this list points to situational forces: obedience to authority, pressure from peers, group loyalty and self-justification. Ordinary Men and Obedience to Authority show how strong these forces can be, while Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) explains how people rationalise harm afterwards.
What is the best book about ordinary people committing atrocities?
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning is one of the most cited. It follows a battalion of middle-aged German policemen who shot thousands of Jews in Poland, and concludes that obedience and peer pressure mattered more than ideology.
What does ’the banality of evil’ mean?
The phrase comes from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). She used it to describe Eichmann as a thoughtless, career-minded bureaucrat rather than a fanatic; the banality refers to the man, not to his crimes. Later historians have challenged her portrait.
Is the Stanford Prison Experiment still considered reliable?
It is widely questioned. The study was criticised on ethical grounds, and critics noted that not all guards behaved sadistically. The Lucifer Effect is worth reading for Zimbardo’s argument, but with those criticisms in mind.
Which novels explore why good people do bad things?
Lord of the Flies, The Lottery, The Reader, The Remains of the Day and Atonement all show ordinary people drawn into harm through fear, tradition, loyalty or certainty that they are right.
Is there a modern, non-historical example?
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou shows how a culture of fear and secrecy at Theranos kept staff quiet, and what it took for whistleblowers to speak up.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
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