2nd Draft Do Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments explain the nature of the Holocaust? Name : Md Shafayet Hossain Fic id : HOSM1D2203 Course : PSYC109 Institution : Fraser International College Abstract This paper discusses the different points of view regarding the famous Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiment by other renowned psychologists. The matter of the discussion is how and how much Milgram’s experiment explains what happened in the Holocaust. Also, this paper offers different reasonings other than obedience which were in the play. This paper mentioned Ervin Staub’s theories where he says there can be multiple reasons behind the Holocaust. It can be psychological frustration and also excluding one particular group from the moral universe. Also, there are different interpretations from Rachel L. Einwahner, Harold Welzer, Cristopher Browning, and Silvia Da Costa on Milgram’s experiment as to why someone may follow an immoral order. Also, the paper discusses Daniel Goldhagen’s argument against Milgram’s “obedience” theory. During the Second World War, humanity witnessed one of the darkest historical events, the Holocaust. It is regarded as the most horrific and organized genocide which was orchestrated by the Nazi regime in Germany. The Nazi Germany killed more over six million Jews during Holocaust. A lot of Jews were forced into living in poor and miserable conditions in the Ghettos. Nazi Germany also established concentration camps, forced labor camps, and extermination camps so that they could torture and kill the Jews and also rip labor benefits out of them. This tragic event questions humanity that how a human can do that to another human being. This question led Stanley Milgram to do one of the most famous psychological experiments there is which is The Stanley Milgram’s Obedience experiment. In that experiment, Stanley Milgram explored the teacher-learner dynamic where the teacher is the participant and the learner is a paid actor. And the experimenter wants the teacher to electrically shock the learner. Gradually every time the teacher shocked the learner, the learner screamed in pain. After each attempt, they raise the level of the shock. After a lot of variation, the result was that 65% of the people kept shocking the learner. The result was surprising to the world and some of the renowned psychiatrists at that time. Now the question is, does this experiment explain everything that happened during the Holocaust? According to Ervin Staub, there is a multiplicity of influences that can lead a person to be involved in extreme group violence (Staub, E. 2014). It can be frustrated psychological needs and viewing the world as a dangerous place may incline a person to engage in group violence. It can also be the devaluation of another group which can lead to excluding that group from the moral universe therefore making violence easier to do. Considering the complexity and multifaceted nature of the Holocaust, Stanley Milgram’s experiment explains one out of many aspects regarding the nature of the Holocaust. Certain Situational factors and social roles can make a person cause harm to another person in the name of doing their job. In 1971, Phillip Zimbardo did an experiment which is known as the Stanford Prison Guard experiment. In that experiment, Phillip Zimbardo and his fellow researchers recruited 24 young male participants for a study on prison life. The researchers created a mock prison in the basement of the Standford psychology department. The researchers randomly assigned all the participants to be either prisoners or guards. In a few days of the experiment guard started to repress all the prisoners. By day six, the cruelty and repression escalated so much that Phillip Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment. This experiment tells us how just by assigning roles may bring out a cruel side of a person. According to Jay J. Van Bavel, there is an another aspect of this experiment which is the leadership role played by the experimenter. In an interview, Phillip Zimbardo mentions that before the experiment began the experimenter briefed the guard to be more strict and disciplinary towards the prisoners. Jay J. Van Bavel argues that the briefing of the experimenter played an important factor for the guards to be more cruel. In terms of Stanley Milgram’s experiment, we can clearly see that the experimenter played an authoritative figure here and the guard was merely following the orders. Exactly like Stanley Milgram’s experiment, it clearly shows to what extent a person can be obedient. when a person is following orders, they completely absolve themselves from the direct responsibility of their action. Cristopher Browning is the first historian to approach the Holocaust using models of social psychological behavior. He explained how 500 low-ranking policemen of german port of hamburg, whom had no experience of killing before, killed around 35000 Jews. Many among them were children and young women. This was a killing spree that lasted more than a year. According to Browning, those police officers were ordinary men. These ordinary men did what they were ordered to do. According to Browning, The circumstances they faced essentially removed their moral qualms and freed them from direct responsibility. Browning used pretrial depositions of hundreds of his Reserve Police Battalion 101. He observed their body language, the questions they faced and how they were manipulating their narrative of what they did. Browning was struck by how few of them expressed any moral concern for what they had done. They were more concerned about not letting their companions down by refusing to shoot. This study helps us understand more why in Stanley Milgram’s experiment the learner kept shocking. Because the responsibility is passed on to the experimenter. Also explains, why so many people during the Holocaust were involved in killing Jews. A step-by-step approach can gradually suppress all the moral qualms a person might have and the person gradually prioritizes the procedure over the situation. German social psychologist Harold Welzer’s work was trying to grasp the social-psychological dynamics of a given situation as a whole. He showed in his work that, violence can be choreographed by individual person taking lead in a group situation. Also, that leader can exploit a specific moral universe where letting down the rest of the group by standing out can be more psychologically detrimental than committing acts of atrocity. Also, according to Herold Welzer, the escalating commitment makes people easier to follow an order that can be morally wrong. According to postwar trial depositions, the perpetrators went through a step-by-step procedure for their first murders. When the perpetrator arrived at the killing site, they were told for the first time what was going to happen. Even though there was an initial hesitation, it was overcome by the senior officer demonstrating himself how a victim should be made to lie down and then shot at a point in the back of the neck. After the perpetrators shot their first victim, they found it easier to follow through. Now the perpetrators focused on the routine involving the skill of shooting in a particular way. Therefore, It made them more concerned about doing the job correctly rather than concerned about what was actually being done. Now we can understand that the step-by-step procedure made the perpetrators suppress their moral threshold and lock them into the routine. We can interpret the same idea from Stanley Milgram’s experiment. The experimenter gave the learners instructions and sets of rules the they have to follow for the sake of the experiment. As Milgram put it, sets of binding factors. In Milgram’s case, because of the instructions, the learners were more concerned with performing the task properly where the task gets progressively more brutal. This also makes sense for what happened in the Holocaust. Following non-normative orders is a combination of the perception of the authority and realization of acting as an agent. As mentioned in Silvia Da Costa’s paper, the perception that the authority figure has the knowledge to define both the problem and the most appropriate response. Also, the ideological legitimacy of an authority makes people more inclined to follow. Because the authority is considered within his right to give orders thus people feel obliged to obey. Another aspect that is described in the paper is the realization of the follower that they are acting as a mere agent who is in no way responsible for the content of the orders one obeys. This phenomenon is also mentioned in Stanley Milgram’s experiment described as an agentic state. Also, the experimenter wearing a white coat can be perceived as legitimacy to the teachers(participants). The participants felt like the experimenter knew what they were doing therefore the participants kept shocking the learner. We can connect this explanation to what happened in the Holocaust. Uncertainty was one of the reason is to why people obey orders from their perceived authority. In Rachel L. Einwahner’s paper, she studied the Jews residing in ghettos during the time of the Holocaust where she found that Jew’s decision to resist the Nazi officials was affected due to uncertainty. The uncertainty was about what was actually going on and the gravity of the situation. Many Jewish people residing in one of those ghettos did not know that Nazi Germany was on a mission to exterminate all Jews. To reduce the uncertainty, they sought guidance from authorities. These authorities were often Nazi officials. Also in Milgram’s experiment, the uncertainty was about what the shock is actually doing to the learner. That knowledge about the shock was not present in that experiment setting. This point of view gives weight to the reasoning behind the “obedience” in Milgram's experiment. In 1996, the young American social scientist, Daniel Goldhagen, published Hitler’s Willing Exicutioners. His study was based on the same battalion that Christopher Browning had studied. He came to different conclusions. He rejected Milgram model as “untenable”. He argues that It was not the work of ordinary man rather it was “ordinary Germans”. By “ordinary Germans” he means that German carried with them a historically embedded desire to eliminate the Jew. From Goldhagen’s point of view, the Germans did all those killings with sadistic enthusiasm. Wheres Milgram saw this as evidence for obedience to authority, Golhagen interpreted as a positive desire to kill Jews. Only a few historians were persuaded by Goldhagen’s argument. The reason behind is that Goldhagen”s argument heavily relied on unverifiable assertations about the antisematic nature of German Society and Culture. He reduced the act of perpetration to a simple and invariable motivation. Another psychologist claimed that Goldhagen was repeating old stereotypes and letting his biased opinions influence the historical facts(Hasian,M.,Jr.,&Frank,R.E.,1999) Considering everything, we can clearly see that Stanley Milgram’s experiment does explain an important aspect of the relationship between the leader and the followers. Events like the Holocaust most certainly can’t be explained in a simple theory as Milgram’s obedience theory. It clearly has much more to it than that. So does Milgram’s experiment explain the nature of the Holocaust? To some extent yes. But for events like the holocaust, there is much more than just “obedience” in the play. References Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809–822. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1037/amp0000443.supp (Supplemental) da Costa, S., Delfino, G., Murattori, M., Zubieta, E., García, L., Páez, D., Beramendi, M., & Sosa, F. (2021). Obedience to authority, cognitive and affective responses and leadership style in relation to a non-normative order: The Milgram experiment. Revista de Psicología, 39(2), 717– 744. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.18800/psico.202102.008 Staub, E. (2014). Obeying, joining, following, resisting, and other processes in the Milgram studies, and in the Holocaust and other genocides: Situations, personality, and bystanders. Journal of Social Issues, 70(3), 501–514. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1111/josi.1207 Einwohner, R. L. (2014). Authorities and uncertainties: Applying lessons from the study of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust to the Milgram legacy. Journal of Social Issues, 70(3), 531–543. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1111/josi.12076 Overy, R. (2014). “Ordinary men,” extraordinary circumstances: Historians, social psychology, and the Holocaust. Journal of Social Issues, 70(3), 515–530. https://doiorg.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/10.1111/josi.12075
