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 Drawing on previously unpublished material from Milgram's personal archive at Yale, this thesis investigates how Milgram developed his research idea to the point where, by the time he ran his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 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>

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.

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.

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 A novel experimental approach to study disobedience to authority

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie A. Caspar
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Ethical Standards ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Painful Electric Shock ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Monetary Gain ◽  
Stanley Milgram ◽  
Obedience To Authority

AbstractFifty years after the experiments of Stanley Milgram, the main objective of the present paper is to offer a paradigm that complies with up-to-date ethical standards and that can be adapted to various scientific disciplines, ranging from sociology and (social) psychology to neuroscience. Inspired by subsequent versions of Milgram-like paradigms and by combining the strengths of each, this paper presents a novel experimental approach to the study of (dis)obedience to authority. Volunteers are recruited in pairs and take turns to be ‘agents’ or ‘victims’, making the procedure fully reciprocal. For each trial, the agents receive an order from the experimenter to send a real, mildly painful electric shock to the ‘victim’, thus placing participants in an ecological set-up and avoiding the use of cover stories. Depending on the experimental condition, ‘agents’ receive, or do not receive, a monetary gain and are given, or are not given, an aim to obey the experimenter’s orders. Disobedience here refers to the number of times ‘agents’ refused to deliver the real shock to the ‘victim’. As the paradigm is designed to fit with brain imaging methods, I hope to bring new insights and perspectives in this area of research.

New Methods in the Psychology of Religion

1976 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Newton Malony
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Psychology Of Religion ◽  
Experimental Methodology ◽  
General Psychology ◽  
Value Conflict ◽  
Psychological Study ◽  
Encounter Group ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Obedience To Authority

Preferred assumptions for the study of religion by psychologists are noted. They are religious empathy, grounding in general psychology, and experimental methodology. Possible new approaches to the psychological study of religion are discussed as they related to (1) theory (cf. cognitive dissonance and experiencing); (2) subjects (secular religionists and encounter group participants); (3) techniques (game theory and obedience to authority); and (4) dependent measures (religiosity and value conflict).

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