The Roots of Stanley Milgram’s Obedience Experiments and Their Relevance to the Holocaust

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Blass
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Stanley Milgram ◽  
Detailed Presentation ◽  
Obedience To Authority

AbstractDrawing on archival materials, interviews, as well as published sources, this article traces the roots of one of the most important and controversial studies in the social sciences, the experiments on obedience to authority conducted by the social psychologist, Stanley Milgram. Milgram’s research had two determinants: First, his attempt to account for the Holocaust and, second, his intention to apply Solomon Asch’s technique for studying conformity to behavior of greater human consequence than judging lengths of lines-the task which was the original focus in Asch’s studies. After a detailed presentation of these antecedents of Milgram’s work, the article concludes with a brief discussion of the applicability of the obedience experiments to the behavior of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Comments

1975 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 55-56
Author(s):  
Karl R. Stadler
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
World War ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Historical Role ◽  
Made In

In recent years there has been a deplorable lack of interest in Austria in the historical role of the Jews in Central Europe. Given the general trends towards internationalization of the social sciences and the interdisciplinary method of analysis, this neglect is most distressing. Presumably this lack of scholarly interest is related to the fact that since World War II the Central European Jews no longer constitute a distinct ethnic and religious group. Apart from studies made in university institutes for Jewish studies and in occasional publications which have mainly treated various aspects of “the holocaust,” most studies have approached Jewish history only collaterally by focusing on anti-Semitism.

Genocide: Clarifying Concepts and Causes of Cruelty

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 513-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ernesto Verdeja
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
World War Two ◽  
World War ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust

In the decades after World War Two, most scholars working on genocide focused on particular cases, providing historically detailed descriptions of the causes and patterns of mass violence but rarely branching out beyond a specific case. The study of the Holocaust is typical of this; the vast majority of works on the Nazi genocide had little comparative dimension and instead examined the ways in which anti-Semitism and certain policies condemned disfavored minorities to persecution and extermination. These earlier works are particularly important because they gave us rich understandings of the origins, sequencing, and dynamics of mass violence, as well as the roles of dehumanizing cultural views and ideologies that facilitated extermination. Nevertheless, multi-case studies were the exception, and generally received little attention in the social sciences.

Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self

PMLA ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 99 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Danson
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Social Self ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
Romantic Comedies ◽  
Technical Sense ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Obedience To Authority

The self in Jonson's comedies, like the self described by modern sociologists, is a reflection of other reflections, created by the society it creates. As Milgram's experiment on obedience to authority seems to show, the social self is radically contingent. Therefore the anagnorisis in Jonson's comedies is a catastrophe in more than the technical sense; it is the discovery of a self that cannot bear its own exposure. By contrast, the heroes and heroines of Shakespeare's romantic comedies discover themselves in relation to a nurturing family and a mature sexual family. Theirs is a psychological self. In the “comical satires,” Jonson encounters the problem of finding appropriate endings for plays whose characters can achieve no satisfying self-discovery. In Volpone the protagonist acts like an experimental social psychologist, exposing the pliability of the social self. The catastrophe shows that Volpone's own “substance” is only a reflection of his world's insubstantiality.

scholarly journals Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiments: Towards an Understanding of Their Relevance in Explaining Aspects of the Nazi Holocaust

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Nestar John Charles Russell
Keyword(s):  
Moral Dilemma ◽  
Experimental Methodology ◽  
Mass Killing ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Organisational Context ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Stanley Milgram ◽  
Obedience To Authority

<p>Two leading Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer and Christopher Browning, have in recent years independently asked how so many ordinary Germans (most of whom in the 1930s had been moderately anti-Semitic) could become by the early 1940s willing murderers of Jews. Social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, had years before been interested in finding answers to similar questions, and to that end in the early 1960s carried out his widely debated "Obedience to Authority" (OTA) experiments at Yale University. Drawing on previously unpublished material from Milgram's personal archive at Yale, this thesis investigates how Milgram developed his research idea to the point where, by the time he ran his first official experiment, he was able to convert the majority of his ordinary subjects into torturers of other people. It is argued that Milgram's experiments were in themselves structured as a bureaucratic microcosm, and say less about obedience to authority, per se, than about the ways in which people in an organisational context resolve a pressing moral dilemma. The thesis uses insights gained from Milgram's experimental innovations to assist in answering the question posed by Bauer and by Browning, focusing on the Nazis' progressive development of mass killing methods, from 1941 to 1944, during Operation Barbarossa and Operation Reinhard. It is shown how these methods were designed to diminish perpetrators' perceptual stimulation, in order to make the "undoable" increasingly "doable", in ways that were later reflected in Milgram's development of his own experimental methodology.</p>

scholarly journals Free Will, Determinism and the “Problem” of Structure and Agency in the Social Sciences

2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Pleasants
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Philosophical Problem ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust

The so-called “problem” of structure and agency is clearly related to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism, yet the central philosophical issues are not well understood by theorists of structure and agency in the social sciences. In this article I draw a map of the available stances on the metaphysics of free will and determinism. With the aid of this map the problem of structure and agency will be seen to dissolve. The problem of structure and agency is sustained by a failure to distinguish between metaphysical and empirical senses of the relation between social structure and individual agency. The ramifications of this distinction are illustrated via a case study of competing explanations of perpetrator behavior in Christopher Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s studies of the German Order Police in the Holocaust.

scholarly journals An Important Milgram-Holocaust Linkage: Formal Rationality

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nestar Russell
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Yale University ◽  
Pilot Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Formal Rationality ◽  
Stanley Milgram ◽  
Baseline Experiment ◽  
Made In ◽  
Obedience To Authority

After Stanley Milgram published his first official Obedience to Authority baseline experiment, some scholars drew parallels between his findings and the Holocaust. These comparisons are now termed the Milgram-Holocaust linkage. However, because the Obedience studies have been shown to differ in many ways from the Holocaust’s finer historical details, more recent literature has challenged the linkage. In this article I argue that the Obedience studies and the Holocaust share two commonalities that are so significant that they may negate the importance others have attributed to the differences. These commonalities are (1) an end-goal of maximising “ordinary” people’s participation in harm infliction and (2) a reliance on Weberian formal rational techniques of discovery to achieve this end-goal. Using documents obtained from Milgram’s personal archive at Yale University, this article reveals the means-to-end learning processes Milgram utilised during his pilot studies in order to maximise ordinary people’s participation in harm-infliction in his official baseline experiment. This article then illustrates how certain Nazi innovators relied on the same techniques of discovery during the invention of the Holocaust, more specifically the so-called Holocaust by bullets. In effect, during both the Obedience studies and the Holocaust processes were developed that made, in each case, the undoable doable.

Splendid Isolation? A Glimpse into Contemporary British Archaeology

2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-108
Author(s):  
Miguel John Versluys
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Roman Archaeology ◽  
Key Points ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Splendid Isolation

Ray Laurence's contribution on the state and future of Roman archaeology as practised in Britain can be summarised as follows: he thinks the discipline to be dominated by a narrative of invasion that is based on literary texts and which has made the concepts of Romanisation and resistance key points in the theoretical discussion. Laurence values this situation as negative. He looks at the discussion on the (im)possibility of representing the Holocaust and at the work of the contemporary architect Rem Koolhaas in trying to formulate alternatives, ending with a manifesto for a twenty-first century Roman archaeology firmly based on recent developments within the social sciences.

scholarly journals Voices off: Stanley Milgram’s cyranoids in historical context

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (5) ◽  
pp. 28-55
Author(s):  
Marcia Holmes ◽  
Daniel Pick
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cyrano De Bergerac ◽  
Stanley Milgram

This article revisits a forgotten, late project by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram: the ‘cyranoid’ studies he conducted from 1977 to 1984. These investigations, inspired by the play Cyrano de Bergerac, explored how individuals often fail to notice when others do not speak their own thoughts, but instead relay messages from a hidden source. We situate these experiments amidst the intellectual, cultural, and political concerns of late Cold War America, and show how Milgram’s studies pulled together a variety of ideas, anxieties, and interests that were prevalent at that time and have returned in new guises since. In discussing the cyranoid project’s background and afterlife, we argue that its strikingly equivocal quality has lent itself to multiple reinterpretations by historians, psychologists, performers, artists, and others. Our purpose is neither to champion Milgram’s work nor to amplify the critiques already made of his methods. Rather, it is to consider the uncertain, allusive, and elusive aspects of the cyranoid project, and to seek to place that project in context, whilst asking where ‘context’ might end. We show how the experiments’ range of meanings, in different temporal registers, far exceeded the explanatory rubric that Milgram and his intellectual critics provided at that time, and ponder the risk for the historian of making anachronistic or teleological assumptions. In short, we argue, cyranoids invite our open-ended exploration of ‘voices offstage’ in social and psychological relations, and offer a useful tool for thinking about historical context and the nature of historical interpretations.

The Obedience Alibi

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David R. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
The Social ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Sense Of Obligation ◽  
Obedience To Authority

AbstractStanley Milgram’s work on obedience to authority is social psychology’s most influential contribution to theorizing about Holocaust perpetration. The gist of Milgram’s claims is that Holocaust perpetrators were just following orders out of a sense of obligation to their superiors. Milgram, however, never undertook a scholarly analysis of how his obedience experiments related to the Holocaust. The author first discusses the major theoretical limitations of Milgram’s position and then examines the implications of Milgram’s (oft-ignored) experimental manipulations for Holocaust theorizing, contrasting a specific case of Holocaust perpetration by Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police. It is concluded that Milgram’s empirical findings, in fact, do not support his position-one that essentially constitutes an obedience alibi. The article ends with a discussion of some of the social dangers of the obedience alibi.

Milgram's Shocking Experiments

Philosophy ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 52 (202) ◽  
pp. 425-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Patten
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Experimental Results ◽  
Laboratory Model ◽  
Social Psychologist ◽  
The Social ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Stanley Milgram

After more than a decade of reflection on obedience experiments based on a laboratory model of his own design, the social psychologist Stanley Milgram is clearly confident that the experimental results make a substantial and striking contribution towards understanding human nature:Something … dangerous is revealed: the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures (188).

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