A Brief Summary of Milgram's Seminal Research on Obedience to Authority

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Social psychology, as a discipline, has given relatively little attention to the problem of evil in society, and those discussions in this field that do exist typically regard evil actions as only varieties of aggression without any characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of intentional mistreatment of others (Berkowitz, 1999). Because of the field's situationistic perspective emphasizing the individual's susceptibility to the power of the immediate situation, social psychologists generally view the fairly high levels of obedience to authority displayed in Milgram's classic experiment as the paradigmatic example of evil behavior (Berkowitz, 1999). Reading about the work of Ross and Nisbett, 1991 (as cited in Berkowitz, 1999, p. 247) stated that “social psychologists, by and large, do not think of evil actions as the product of evil personalities. Rather, they emphases the immediate situation's great influence on thoughts, feelings, and behavior, they tend to minimize the role of individual dispositions.”

Remembering back to the the time of the Holocaust, an event that went down as one of the biggest human mass genocides of all time. Blass (1991) questions the exact parallels between the actions of Milgram's subjects and those of the Nazis under Hitler during the Holocaust and to attempts at understanding its causes. According to Dörner and Güss (2011), “regarding Hitler as a human being means that Hitler is not completely strange and different, someone who cannot be understood. It means that we can find Hitler in ourselves, through such behavior tendencies: the misattribution of failure, the loss of touch with reality, the affirmative perception, the tendency to feel powerful through decisive actions” (p. 48)...

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...dhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace And Conflict: Journal Of Peace Psychology, 16(3), 295-319. doi:10.1080/10781911003773530

Navarick, D. J. (2012). HISTORICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MILGRAM PARADIGM: TESTS OF AN EXPERIMENTALLY DERIVED MODEL OF DEFIANCE USING ACCOUNTS OF MASSACRES BY NAZI RESERVE POLICE BATTALION 101. Psychological Record, 62(1), 133-154.

Perry, Gina. 2012. Behind the Shock Machine: The untold story of the notorious Milgram psychology experiments , Melbourne and nLondon: Scribe Books. New York: The New Press, 2013.

Rigby, K. K., & Rump, E. E. (1982). Attitudes toward authority and authoritarian personality characteristics. The Journal Of Social Psychology, 116(1), 61-72. doi:10.1080/00224545.1982.9924395

Rose, L., & Nisbett, R.E. (1991). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York: Mc Graw-Hill.

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