The Lucifer Effect in The Boys

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]When you think of evil, what comes to mind?

[00:00:05]For me, it's [music] this guy.

[00:00:07]But if you've seen The Boys, you'll agree with me that it's this guy.

[00:00:13]>> [laughter] >> But Homelander is not the most disturbing character in The Boys because he was always a monster.

[00:00:20]The characters I believe are more terrifying are the ones who weren't. The ones who started normal, good even, because their stories force us to confront a far more uncomfortable question. What actually turns people evil?

[00:00:37]This question sits at the center of The Lucifer Effect by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who describes The Lucifer Effect as the processes of transformation at work when good or ordinary people do bad or evil things.

[00:00:50]And that's why I find The Boys so fascinating because beneath the satire, the show is a psychological case study about moral transformation. So, in this video, I'm going to analyze two characters across the moral spectrum of The Boys to understand how power, trauma, systems, and fear slowly reshape human behavior. Not to figure out who is good or evil, but to answer a much deeper question.

[00:01:19]>> How does THIS NOT ALL START WITH YOU, HUEY? THE ONLY DIFFERENCE between you and me is that I made A MISTAKE. THE [ __ ] THAT YOU DID WAS ON PURPOSE.

[00:01:28]SO, WHO'S WORSE?

[00:01:32]>> MY analysis of Huey's psychology begins with the absurd and meaningless destruction of He witnesses a human life reduced to fragments in seconds, and the system that caused it simply continued. This is important to note because psychologically, Huey does not just experience grief. He experiences moral inquiry.

[00:01:52]>> She just stepped in the middle of the street.

[00:01:55]I couldn't What was it? She was a half step off the [ __ ] curb.

[00:02:00]>> The world has violated his expectation that justice exists, consequences follow actions, and good behavior is rewarded.

[00:02:07]Instead, he learns that power protects itself.

[00:02:11]>> I'm not signing anything. Get out.

[00:02:15]Get the hell out!

[00:02:18]>> This is the first crack in his psychological structure, and through that crack, we see something very specific. We see a rage that feels morally justified.

[00:02:29]>> [laughter] >> [ __ ] worth it.

[00:02:33]>> So, what are you going to do about it?

[00:02:36]>> [music] >> At the beginning of his book, Zimbardo introduces us to this illusion by M.C.

[00:02:44]Escher.

[00:02:45]>> This is a wonderful illusion some of you know by the artist M.C. Escher.

[00:02:49]And it's an illusion of angels and devils. Look at it for a moment.

[00:02:53]And some of you going to see a a world full of angels, and some of you going to see a world full of devils.

[00:02:58]>> Then he points us to three psychological truths that emerge from the image.

[00:03:02]The first truth is one that Hughie comes to, which is the world is filled with both good and evil. It was, it is, and it will always be. The second truth is that the barrier between good and evil is permeable and nebulous. And you can see just how vague that barrier becomes as Hughie grieves Robin.

[00:03:24]>> Many people say our condolences and my sympathies and our regrets, but nobody can look me in the [ __ ] eye and say I'm sorry.

[00:03:33]>> At this stage, Hughie is still nonviolent, but something begins to shift internally. And so, his mind introduces a solution that feels clean, righteous even. I'm talking about revenge.

[00:03:46]>> Okay, man. I'm in.

[00:03:48]>> This is where the Lucifer effect begins to take shape in him, Not through cruelty, but through justification.

[00:03:54]Because once harm becomes deserved, the moral barrier weakens. And Huey begins to change in a very specific way. Even though he doesn't stop being compassionate.

[00:04:06]>> You can't get A-Train if you're a greasy smear on the pavement.

[00:04:13]I'm not a murderer.

[00:04:14]>> What I find particularly interesting is that I found myself supporting his descent to evil. In fact, I remember being annoyed that Huey wasn't vengeful enough towards A-Train. And if you felt that same way, I'm sure that tells you about how you've also been affected by the Lucifer effect.

[00:04:31]>> So, for me, the Lucifer effect is really about the transformation of human character.

[00:04:37][music] >> You see, it wouldn't just happen dramatically. It would happen slowly.

[00:04:43]Huey doesn't just wake up one day as a different person. His morality adjusts in small steps. Lying becomes necessary.

[00:04:51]Manipulation becomes strategic. Violence becomes situational. And fear becomes permission. Even when Huey resists all of this, he adapts.

[00:05:06]>> You want to know what's really messed up?

[00:05:08]Is uh in some ways just right in that moment, it felt kind of good.

[00:05:17]>> When Huey kills Translucent, it's not screamed as triumph, but shock. But what matters psychologically is what comes after. Because after crossing that line, the mind adjusts. The impossible becomes possible. And when something becomes possible, it becomes repeatable under pressure.

[00:05:36]This is how desensitization works in the Lucifer effect model.

[00:05:40]Not sudden transformation, but repeated exposure to moral compromise until emotional resistance weakens. Huey never celebrates violence. In fact, he hates it. But, it doesn't change the fact that he is capable of it. At no point does he internally identify as evil, even when he lies or manipulates or kills. He remains anchored to the belief that he is doing it for the right reasons. This is exactly what makes the Lucifer effect so dangerous, because people rarely experience themselves as villains. They experience themselves as justified, pressured, reactive, or forced.

[00:06:19]I find Hughie complex because despite his moral barrier going bust, Hughie remains fundamentally unfit for the world of The Boys. He is not built for it, and everyone around him knows it.

[00:06:32]>> You were You were always like my canary.

[00:06:36]I suppose.

[00:06:37]>> Butcher even describes him as a canary in the coal mine, as he always calls The Boys out when they are out of pocket.

[00:06:44]And he remains reluctant to engage in violence towards their enemies, even showing them compassion sometimes. And that is the real psychological tension, not whether Hughie becomes evil, but how much of his humanity he can preserve while still participating in violence.

[00:07:01]The third truth that Zimbardo drew from this illusion is that it is possible for angels to become devils, and perhaps more difficult to conceive for devils to become angels.

[00:07:19]When I first saw A-Train on this show, I hated him for what he did to Hughie.

[00:07:24]>> I can't stop. I can't stop. I can't stop.

[00:07:27]>> Even more so when he joked about it.

[00:07:29]>> I cannot believe you ran through a [ __ ] I ran so fast through this [ __ ] that I swallowed one of her molars.

[00:07:37]Like a bug on the [ __ ] freeway.

[00:07:39]>> [laughter] >> Now, on the surface, this feels like pure sociopathy. And maybe part of it is, but psychologically, I think something interesting is happening here.

[00:07:50]Because Adrian is not operating as an individual. He is operating as a part of a group and a product of a system. At the beginning of the Lucifer effect, Zimbardo references the Stanford prison experiment, explaining how ordinary people placed into specific institutional roles began behaving in ways completely alien original As Zimbardo puts it, good dispositions were pitted against the bad situation, and over time, the environment itself began overriding the morality of the individuals inside it.

[00:08:21]>> We were creating the prison, and people were suffering. The guards were behaving sadistically, brutally.

[00:08:28]>> At times, even I forgot I was an experimenter and acted like a prison warden.

[00:08:33]>> This is exactly what happens to Adrian.

[00:08:36]You see, before he became Adrian, he was Reggie, a kid from poverty who genuinely wanted to do good. But inside Vought, his morality became secondary to performance. His value became determined by ratings, marketability, speed, branding, and relevance, not his humanity. And when human beings spend enough time inside systems like that, their psychology adapts.

[00:09:00]>> I love you.

[00:09:02]>> I love you, too.

[00:09:10]>> This is one of the central ideas behind the Lucifer effect. People do not need to become monsters to commit monstrous acts. Sometimes, they simply adapt to environments where empathy becomes inconvenient.

[00:09:23]>> Don't you ever smudge baby doll.

[00:09:28]>> And what's disturbing about Robin's death is not just the act itself, it's how quickly the machine absorbs it. The group normalizes the horror almost instantly. And just as Zimbardo observed, groups are incredibly powerful at diluting personal responsibility.

[00:09:45]This is why ordinary people can participate in cruelty collectively, while individually believing they are still good people.

[00:09:53]>> You let that guy die.

[00:09:56]>> He didn't do anything wrong.

[00:09:58]>> He was dead already.

[00:09:59]>> Zimbardo explores this same phenomenon when discussing atrocities like the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where approximately 500,000 Tutsi women and girls were systematically raped, sexually mutilated, and assaulted by the Hutu militia. Before, I knew that a man could kill another man, because it happens all the time. Now, I know that even the person with whom you've shared food, or with whom you've slept, even he can kill you with no trouble. The closest neighbor can kill you with his teeth.

[00:10:28]This is what I have learned since the genocide, and my eyes no longer gaze the same on the face of the world. These were the words of Bethe, a survivor of this massacre, showing us that one of the most horrifying aspects of the violence was how quickly brutality became socially reinforced behavior.

[00:10:46]People who never committed violence alone became capable of unspeakable acts once cruelty was normalized by the group around them. I'm not morally equating A-Train to genocide perpetrators, but psychologically, the mechanism is similar. When systems reward cruelty, when groups normalize dehumanization, and responsibility becomes collective instead of personal, that moral barrier weakens, and A-Train becomes a perfect example of this, because after enough time inside the Seven, human life starts feeling abstract to him. Collateral damage, which is Robin in this case, becomes PR management. His relationship with Popclaw becomes a liability, and empathy becomes weakness. So, he never shows his when he's forced to apologize to Huey.

[00:11:34]His apology to Huey feels emotionally empty because he has become psychologically disconnected from the consequences of his actions. What makes Adrian fascinating is that he survives through compartmentalization. He separates his image from his guilt, his career from his morality, and humanity from his behavior. That's why he's able to kill Popclaw while still convincing himself that he had no choice.

[00:11:57]>> The only good thing in MY LIFE IS GONE NOW. WHAT IS THIS, MAN? I KILL YOUR GIRLFRIEND AND you kill mine?

[00:12:03]>> I didn't kill your girlfriend.

[00:12:04]>> You used her.

[00:12:06]>> And this is why I think The Boys is terrifyingly realistic because most people imagine evil as emotional, passionate, chaotic, or even sadistic.

[00:12:15]But institutional evil is often emotionally numb, routine, professional, or performative. Even while I was observing his addiction to Compound V, I saw that underneath all that arrogance, he's terrified of being irrelevant because Vought has conditioned him to believe that his worth only exists through performance. And once a person's self-worth becomes tied entirely to status, that person will become capable of doing almost anything to preserve that status unless something changes.

[00:12:47]>> What about A-Train?

[00:12:48]>> You do need a speedster since Shockwave exploded. Harder sell.

[00:12:52]One has been back is >> redemption.

[00:12:56]>> Two is weakness.

[00:12:58]>> Sons of [ __ ] >> For the first time in his life, the system stops rewarding him. His greatest fear comes true and suddenly the role of A-Train no longer protects Reggie from himself. And this is where his redemption actually begins.

[00:13:12]>> I'm sorry. It's [ __ ] up.

[00:13:14]Seeing somebody that you love get hurt like that.

[00:13:18]I'm [ __ ] sorry, Huey.

[00:13:20]>> For the first time, Reggie is forced to sit with the consequences of who he became. He experiences humiliation, powerlessness, rejection, the exact emotions he spent his entire life avoiding, and slowly buried underneath under years of conditioning.

[00:13:36]>> I said, "Get the [ __ ] out of my house. I don't want to murder in the same house with my kids."

[00:13:42]>> [ __ ] Nate. I'm sorry.

[00:13:43]>> The moment that made me lose every single hate I had for this character was when he saved MM and finally experienced what being a hero is actually supposed to feel like.

[00:13:57]>> [music] >> For the first time in his life, Adrian begins acting morally outside the incentive structure of the system that created him. And this is why I think his final moments are so brilliant.

[00:14:15]Years earlier, Adrian destroyed Robin without slowing down. But during his final run, when he sees a civilian in his path, he moves even though doing so cost him his life. That small decision says more about his redemption than any speech ever could.

[00:14:31]>> What was I so afraid of?

[00:14:34]>> And in the end, when he finally stands against Homelander, he does something the old Adrian never could.

[00:14:40]>> You are [ __ ] nothing.

[00:14:46]>> He stops being afraid because he's free from the system that taught him survival mattered more than morality.

[00:14:56]>> [snorts] >> Zimbardo defines evil as intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others, or using one's authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf. In short, evil is knowing better but doing worse. And I think this is a theme that is heavily explored in this show, especially in season 5.

[00:15:28]>> I am your god.

[00:15:29]>> Homelander has now become the face of evil. But after reading The Lucifer Effect, every major character now seems to be bordering on that nebulous moral barrier. The show forces us to confront something we desperately want to believe isn't true, which is evil [music] is adaptive. It grows slowly through fear, grief, humiliation, systems, incentives, survival, and justification until people wake up one day barely recognizing the person they've become.

[00:15:58]Still, I don't think The Lucifer Effect is a hopeless idea because Zimbardo's conclusion was never that human beings are naturally evil. It was that the line between good and evil is frighteningly thin and exists inside all of us, which also means the capacity for resistance exists inside all of us, too. That's why Hughie's compassion matters. It's also why A-Train's redemption matters, too.

[00:16:21]Not because they became perfect people, but because in a world constantly rewarding moral compromise, they still fought to reclaim some part of their humanity.

[00:16:30]As for me, I've made peace with the fact that I could be an evil [ __ ] any day from now. But in the meantime, I will do everything in my power to guard that permeable moral barrier.