Making the Undoable Doable

Abstract

This article interprets Stanley Milgram's laboratory experiments on obedience, and their significance in under-standing the Holocaust and the ways by which governmental systems enable people to do things they would otherwise find undoable. Milgram tended to conflate "proximity"-between participants and learners-and sensory perception, and overlooked the difference between physical and emotional distance. Neither Milgram nor his commentators have fully recognized the importance of the shock generator in these experiments. Milgram's paradigm shows why the Nazis' search for increasingly "productive" killing means, which minimized levels of sensory perception among immediate perpetrators, was a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition of the Holocaust. Milgram's key concept of "the agentic state" is reinterpreted as an act of moral choice, rather than as a psychological state of mind. An understanding of the conditional nature of legal-rational (bureaucratic) authority is essential if ways are to be found of resolving "the paradox of modernity."

Climate Catastrophe and Stanley Milgram’s Electric Shock “Obedience” Experiments: An Uncanny Analogy

“…Why did most participants in the New Baseline choose what astounded viewers of Milgram's documentary film so confidently identified as wrongdoing-why did most decide to "harm" instead of help an innocent person? Although Blass believes Milgram's (1974) own theory is his book's "weakest" section (Blass 2004, p. 216), other theoretical contributions have emerged (see Erdos 2013;Haslam et al 2014;Eckman 1977;Nissani 1990;Russell 2014aRussell , 2018Russell and Gregory 2005. The last five of these references, we believe, hold the most potential to better understanding humankind's present failure to avert impending climate catastrophe.…”

How Ideology Shapes What We Teach about Authority: A Comparative Analysis of the Presentation of Milgram’s Experiments in Textbooks

“…The agentic state thesis is the foundation of the celebratory accounts offered by Baron's and Myers' social psychology textbooks. However, there is now broad agreement amongst scholars of Milgram's experiments that on its own, the agentic state thesis is a weak explanation (Blass, 2004;Haslam & Reicher, 2017;Reicher, Haslam & Miller, 2014;Russell, 2014;Russell & Gregory, 2005). Two developments have stimulated this rethink -historical analysis of the Holocaust which highlights that much of the killing by Nazi soldiers was willing and hate-filled rather than blind following of orders; and new archival analysis of Milgram's papers at Yale, Harvard and the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio.…”

Genocide and the Healing Professions

“…48 Zimbardo (2007), 297-323. 49 Glas (2006), 178-79. insulation: perpetrators did not face their victims, who became non-human legitimate targets (Browning 1998;Glover;50 Russell and Gregory 2005;Bauman 1989, and Rowan Savage in this volume). Each agent's task is plausibly deniable.…”

“…Conversely, the experimenter's reduced physical proximity (for example, instructing via phone), the learner's distress sounds or increased proximity (for example, having to hold the learner's arm on a shock plate), conflicting authority (incompatible orders of equal status experimenters), and peer rebellion (observed disobedience of other teachers (actually actors)), reduced obedience. Perhaps non-strangers (family, friends) as learners reducing emotional distance would have decreased obedience, while the procedural impersonality of the shock generator facilitated it (Russell and Gregory 2005). Choosing to please rather than confront the experimenter, most participants relinquished personal responsibility and delegated: administering word-pair tests while another participant administered shocks ensured high (93 per cent) compliance.…”