The Stanley Milgram Experiments and the Holocaust - Book Report/Review Example

Milgram and Destructive Obedience Submitted by: Submitted Introduction The Holocaust is the term used to describe the planned and executed extermination of Jews from all German controlled and influenced territories. This tragic event in the history of mankind saw the death of a staggering six-million European Jews during World War II staged by the National Socialist party headed by Adolf Hitler. It was the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and ultimately saw the systematic execution and brutal treatment of the Jews which Germany saw as infecting the 'pure and superior' Aryan race which they imagined they belonged. Such event naturally gives rise to speculations on why the Nazi did it. Just how could an entire nation commit itself to the killing of their own based on religious differences The general thought was that the Nazi were purely evil but Stanley Milgram and his experiments tell another story. Instead of the purely evil depiction of the Nazi, the command structure provided the setting wherein those in the lower echelons became obedient to the orders given to them. It was not purely a matter of innate hatred that drove the guards at Auschwitz to exterminate their prisoners but a matter of following orders. Milgram's experiments also showed that even ordinary citizens German, American or any other nationalities can become accomplices in a genocidal act due to the authority that they have committed themselves for employment. In this paper, I will be analyzing Milgram's experiments and its contribution to the understanding of genocide and basically try to find out what drives people to commit wholesale murder. I will also be evaluating other perspectives and comparing it with Milgram's contentions. The Jewish Situation Thomas Blass (1991), a rather prolific writer with subjects mostly on Milgram, relates the situation of the Jews in the pre-World War II era. During the summer of 1944, the Nazis, under the direction of Eichmann and with the assistance of their Hungarian allies, were in the process of rounding up the Jews of Budapest and segregating them prior to transporting them in cattle cars to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Budapest is split by the Danube River into two parts, Buda and Pest. One day during the roundups, a Jewish mother and her two-and-a-half-year-old child were taking the trolley from Pest where they had been visiting relatives, to Buda, where they were currently living in a recently found apartment. Unlike most of her fellow Jews, she believed the unbelievable, deadly rumors about what "resettlement for work in the east" really meant. So rather than remaining in Pest, she obtained forged Christian identity papers and moved to Buda, which had been a largely non-Jewish part of the city. The trolley was crossing the bridge between Buda and Pest when the rhythmic clatter of the trolley-car's wheels was interrupted by the insistent sound of the child's voice: "Mommy," he asked, "why don't I wear a cap like other Jewish boys" This was within earshot of many of the other passengers, which included members of the Nyilas, the Hungarian Nazi militia. With a resourcefulness spawned by desperation, the mother quickly turned to her child and said, "This is our stop," grabbed his hand and got off the trolley- right in the middle of the bridge, quite a distance from their actual destination. Miraculously, no one stopped them. The question that becomes very important now is why this mother felt threatened by her fellow Hungarians at that moment. If her child had made the same remark before the war she probably would have not taken evasive action. The question, in more general form, is perhaps one the primary psychological puzzles underlying the mass destruction of European Jewry.: What psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish resulting in the death of six million of them Milgram states that it's all a matter of destructive obedience. Destructive Disobedience Obedience is the act of compliance to the commands of a legitimate authority. In destructive obedience, the acquiescence is to a command to harm another person. The phrase was first introduced into the social sciences in 1963 by Stanley Milgram in his 1963 article "Behavioral Study of Obedience" in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology describing the first of a series of experiments on obedience he conducted at Yale University from 1961 to 1962. The context for the emergence of such extreme obedience was an experiment focusing ostensibly on the effects of punishment on learning. The subject was to teach another person- the learner- a list of word-pairs and to punish him with electric shock every time he made an error. The shock machine contained 30 switches, each labeled in 15-volt increments beginning with 15 volts and ending with 450 volts. The shock levels were also marked by verbal designations beginning with "Slight Shock" and ending with "Danger: Severe Shock." The last two switches corresponding to the 435 and 450 voltage levels were marked simply and ominously, "XXX". The subject was instructed to begin with the lowest voltage switch and to increase the shock level one step at a time, on each subsequent error. Although unbeknownst to the subject, the learner was an actor who made errors on designated trials and was not actually shocked, the experiment was a very real and typically powerful experience for the subject as the following observation by Milgram reveals: "Many subjects showed signs of nervousness in the experimental situation, and especially upon administering the more powerful shocks. In a large number of cases, the degree of tension reached extremes that are rarely seen in sociopsychological laboratory studies. Subjects were observed to sweat, tremble, stutter, bite their lips, groan and dig their fingernails into their flesh. These were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the experiment." (Miller, 1963) Although the shocks were fake and the learner was an actor who feigned his suffering, the experiment was stressful for most of the subjects. Sixty-five percent of the subjects were fully obedient to the experiment's commands progressing to the maximum shock. The unexpectedly high rate of destructive obedience was the central and most dramatic finding in Milgram's experiments. While we did not need Milgram to tell us that people tend to obey authorities, the sheer power of that finding was revelatory; that ordinary people would act contrary to conscience and hurt an innocent person at the bidding of an authority without coercive means to enforce his or her commands. A partial transcript is provided in the appendix. Milgram conducted over twenty different variations in his series of experiments on destructive obedience. A second important insight is provided by a subset of those variations. In that series, Milgram varied the distance between the teacher and the learner. As the distance was reduced, so was the percentage of obedient subjects. The morality of shocking an innocent victim did not change from condition to condition but the tendency to obey the destructive orders did, demonstrating that the immediate situation can have powerful effects on behavior even at the expense of the subject's personal inclinations. (Blass, 1991) Milgram undertook his research to shed light on the Holocaust in an attempt to explain how normal people could become complicit in carrying out the murderous commands of Nazi leaders. Although early twenty-first century regulations in the United States and other countries make it virtually impossible to replicate Milgram's experiments, experiences in real life continue to affirm the findings. For example, in 2004, two male students at a Georgia high school obeyed their teacher's orders to throw an unruly female classmate out of the window. Real-life events also have broadened the scope of destructive obedience in several ways. For instance, it is known that destructive obedience in several ways. For instance, it is known that destructive obedience can take place even when the self is the victim. A review of airplane accidents between 1978 and 1990 found that in about 25 percent of cases the first officer's reluctance to correct an error made by his captain was a contributing factor. Also the power of destructive obedience is as strong as or stronger than is the case when obedient act is physically destructive, strong enough to override a person's moral or ethical principles. As a teaching exercise, a University of San Diego law professor, Steven Hartwell had his students advise a client on how best to present her side of a rent dispute in court. Hartwell told them to advise the client to lie under oath and say that she had paid her rent. Twenty-three of twenty-four subjects complied and told the woman to perjure herself. (Hilberg, 1980) The Milgram Influence Although a variety of psychological explanations for the destructive behavior of the Nazis and their allies have been proposed, none is as much prominent as that offered by the Milgram experiment which assumes a Situational Approach. Situational perspectives on the Holocaust, much like the historically dominant approach in social psychology, seek explanations in forces outside the individual, emanating largely from the social environment. Even deviant or counter normative behavior is to be understood not in terms of internal determinants but primarily through the analysis of the causal structure of the immediate situation. As Aronson (1984) put it: "Occasionally natural situations become focused into pressure so great that they cause people to behave in ways easily classifiable as abnormal". The most influential proponent of a situational perspective on the Holocaust was that of Milgram. As already mentioned, Milgram reported his startling, and well known, findings that 65% of his subjects - ordinary New Haven residents- were willing to punish another person with as much as 450 volts of electric shock at the bidding of an experimenter, despite the fact that the victim had done nothing to the subject to merit such severe action that the experimenter had no special powers to enforce his orders. Very few research programs in psychology can match the continuing attention received by Milgram's studies on the dynamics of obedience to authority. An important factor accounting for his attention is the troubling lesson Milgram derives from it about Human nature, i.e., just how easily normal people possessing no malevolence can be made to carry out inhumane commands. In particular is the imposition that anyone- not just the Nazis and their collaborators- would have been a willing participant in the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. Milgram's analysis has been accepted not only by many introductory psychology tests but also by more advanced and scholarly treatments. (Blass, 2004) Milgram's approach is situational in the sense that the external pressures of the moment exerted by the authority - rather than internal determinants of the subject's harsh actions. Further, once the subject has relinquished responsibility to the authority, the subject's actions are no longer under the usual moral constraints according to Milgram. The potential relevance of his work to the Holocaust was continually salient in Milgram's writings beginning with the first report of his obedience findings. And here is how he describes, in a later report, the relevance of his findings for understanding Holocaust: "A commonly offered explanation is that those who shocked the victim at the most severe level were monsters, the sadistic fringe of society. But if one considers that almost two thirds of the participants fell into the category of "obedient" subjects, and that they represented ordinary people.. the argument become very shaky. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of the issue that arose in connection with Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt contended that the prosecution's effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he became closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job After witnessing hundreds of ordinary persons submit to the authority in our own experiments. I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closed to the truth than one might dare imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation, simply by doing their jobs and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process." Although Milgram recognized that there are "enormous differences of circumstances and scope "between obedience in his laboratory and Nazi Germany, he argues that "a common psychological process is centrally involved in both events: He believes that his experiments speak to all superordinate-suboirdinate relationships in which people become willing agents of a legitimate authority to whom they relinquish responsibility for their actions. Once they have done so, their actions are no nolger guided by their conscience but by how adequately they have fulfilled the authority's wishes. The Banality of Evil Milgram's approach has a good deal of appeal. It is certainly consistent with the litany if "I was only following orders" heard repeatedly at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials of the major Nazi leaders at the end of World War II. It also has support from Arendt's analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had been in charge of deporting the Jews from all countries occupied by Germany to the death camps in the East. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she claimed that Eichmann was a very conventional person, guided largely by a drive to advance his career rather than hate for his victims. The impressions of Simon Wiesenthal (1979), whose investigative work led to Eichmann's capture by the Israelis, are very similar. He describes Eichmann as "an utterly bourgeois, an utterly normal, almost in fact a socially, adjusted, person He was not driven by blood lust." The "banality of evil" thesis also finds support in the writings of Hilberg. Hilberg (1989) has pointed out that the Nazis; success in carrying out their destructive plans on such a massive scale was made possible by countless bureaucrats and agents applying their practiced skills and standard procedures to the task at hand. Among the examples he mentions is the SS being billed by the German railroad for each Jewish deportee it transported. Milgram was also on solid ground in pinpointing obedience to authority as a possible key to understanding the Holocaust, given the high value placed on obedience by Nazi ideology and German culture generally. For example, the first of twelve commandments listed in a primer used to indoctrinate Nazi youth was : "The leader is always right." And many generations of German children grew up on cautionary tales such as Struwwelpeter or Shock-headed Peter whose moral was that disobedience could lead to rather drastic, violent consequences. (in Blass, 2000) Analyzing Milgram's Contentions The adequacy of Milgram's approach rests on two assumptions which bear closer examination. One is that he has demonstrated destructive disobedience in the laboratory. In order to argue that the same psychological processes guided both the Nazi bureaucrat or death-camp guard and the subject in an obedience experiment, it is first necessary to assess the evidence for the operation of those processes in the Milgram-type experiment itself. (Milgram, 1974) The second assumption underlying the adequacy of Milgram's approach is that his conceptualizations fit the historical facts. Was the obedient Nazi subordinate mechanically carrying out the murderous commands of his leader, without any hate or hostility towards his victims, an accurate characterization of the prototype Nazi perpetrator (Milgram, 1974 and 1992) Let's look at each of these questions in turn. First, did subjects in a Milgram-type experiment see their actions as destructive, i.e., that they were harming and possibly killing the "learner" A parallel between the actions of Milgram's obedient subjects and the murderous actions of the Nazis is based on the correctness of his assumption. Mixon (1971) has vigorously differed with Milgram's contention that his subject's behavior was a manifestation of destructive obedience. He argues that both the subject's expectations about what is tolerable in a scientific experiment and the experimenter's verbal reassurances about the shocks being painful but not hazardous reassure the subjects about the safety of the procedures. Although they might expect the learner to be in pain, they do not expect him to be harmed. Subjects became disobedient, according to Mixon, when doubts about the protection of the learner's well-being begin to set in. Support for Mixon's more benign interpretation of the Milgram experiment comes from a series of non-active role playing procedures in which a subject is read a description of the obedience experiment up to the point where the learner has pounded on the wall. The listener subject was then asked to describe what he thought happened after this point. By systematically changing the details about the procedure read to subjects, Mixon was able to get variations in predicted obedience. These ranged from 0% of the subjects predicting complete disobedience when the description they read clearly indicated that the learner was in danger of being harmed to 90% where indications of possible harm were minimized. (Mixon, 1972) On the other, there are replications of the obedience experiment that are supportive of Milgram's view that the subjects obeyed even when harm to the learner was likely. For example, Ring, Wallston and Corey had subjects administer increasingly "painful: sound to a learner. As the learner screamed and sobbed in apparent agony, the experimenter acted as if he had not expected these kinds of reactions. Yet 91% of the subjects were fully obedient- the highest rate of obedience reported in the literature for a standard obedience experiment. (Mixon, 1972 and 1979) To sum up, the evidence on the question of destructiveness of subjects' actions within the Milgram-type experiment is not wholly uniform. But even if we were to give more weight to the evidence in favor of the destructive view of subjects' behavior, we need to turn to the other side of the potential equation to see how Milgram's model fits the historical details of the Holocaust itself. Following Orders of Following their Whims As noted earlier, Milgram saw Arendt's (1963) "banality of evil" thesis to be consistent with his own findings and conclusions. Yet a reading of the Holocaust literature can certainly lead one to contest the idea that a cold, emotionless, and dutiful approach (e.g. Eichmann's) was prototypic of the Nazi's behavior. To begin with, Arendt's perception of Eichmann has been challenged. Kelman and Hamilton (1989) points out that Eichmann pursued his goal of shipping as many Jews as possible to the extermination camps with a degree of drive, perseverance and enthusiasm that was clearly beyond the call of duty. Furthermore, to intensify their suffering, in many cases large scale actions against the Jews were timed to coincide with their religious holidays. For example, the deportation of the Jews of Warsaw began on the eve of Tisha-B'Av (July 22, 1942), the day of the mourning which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The historical evidence on the spontaneity, inventiveness and enthusiasm with which the Nazis degraded, hurt and killed their victims also argues against explaining their behavior as simply responses to an authority's commands despite the perpetrator's abhorrence of their own actions and without hate toward their victims. It must have come from within. (Blass,2004) Here is one of countless examples (in Hirsch and Spiro, 1988): "Simone LaGrange was sent to Auschwitz and, one day, saw her father there. He was in a column of men marching by. She waved and an SS guard asked if that was really her father. "Then go kiss him, girl," the guard said. She ran to her father. The guard shot him." And here is a description by a survivor of the Majdanek concentration camp of the kind of brutalities that routinely took place there: "A customary SS habit was to kick a Jew with a heavy boot. The Jew was forced to stand to attention, and all the while the SS man kicked him until he broke some bones. People who stood near enough to such a victim often heard the breaking of the bones. The pain was so terrible that people, having undergone that treatment, died in agony". And as a final example were the actions of an Einsatzgruppe or mobile killing unit, in operation in the town of Uman, in Ukraine. A German army officer described how the Jews of the area were gathered near the airport and surrounded by SS men and other militia. The Jews were ordered to undress, hand over everything they owned and stand in a line in front of a ditch. They were then shot and thrown in the ditch. The observer stated that no one was overlooked: "Even women carrying children two to three weeks old, suckling at their breasts, were not spared this horrible ordeal. Nor were mothers spared the terrible sight of their children being gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of the pistol butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead. Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did they receive the bullet released them from this sight. Significantly, the observer also noted that the killers worked "with such zealous intent that one could have supposed this activity to have been their lifework". (Miller, 1986) But in some ways, a quote that is most directly at odds with Arendt's "banality of evil" thesis can be found in an introduction to a book about the trial in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965 of 22 SS men who served at Auschwitz. The book contains the testimony of witnesses describing the unimaginable acts of torture and murder perpetrated by the defendants,. The writer of the introduction reflected on the horrors described in the book: "No one had issued orders that infants should be thrown into the air as shooting targets or hurled into the fire alive or have their head smashed against the walls.. Innumerable individual crimes, one more horrible than the next, surrounded and created the atmosphere of the gigantic crime of extermination." The author was none other than Hannah Arendt giving recognition to the fact that there was another face to the Holocaust than that of a dutiful bureaucrat and she stated that the Frankfurt trial " in many respects reads like a much-needed supplement to the Jerusalem trial." Thus while her phrase "banality of evil" has sometimes been adopted by some to describe the essential nature of Nazi destructiveness, it would seem that Arendt herself had second thoughts about the phrase. A unique perspective vis--vis Arendt's earlier view is provided by Lifton in his in-depth study of the role of the medical profession in carrying out the Nazi program of destruction. He shows how SS doctors were centrally involved in all aspects of the killing process, ranging from providing a scientific aura for the Nazis' "biomedical vision," which saw Jews as deadly germs that had to be cleansed from the "tissue" of the "Aryan" civilization, to the killing of camp inmates via injections to the heart. He relates his findings to Arendt;s conclusion as follows: "Consider Hannah Arnedt's celebrated judgment on Adolf Eichmann and the "banality of the evil". That phrase has emerged as a general characterization of the entire Nazi project. What I have noted about the ordinariness of Nazi doctors as men would seem to be further evidence of her thesis but not quite. Nazi doctors were banal, but what they did was not. Repeatedly in this, I describe banal men performing demonic acts. In doing so-or in order to do so- the men themselves, changed, and in carrying out ther actions, they themselves were no longer banal". A final perspective on how a situational approach fits the details of the Holocaust is provided by Hilberg who said: "When Milgram performed his experiment at Yale, his model comprised an authority figure and men who did as they were told. How accustomed we are to thinking in these terms about the administrative process in totalitarian systems. The reality, however, was much more complex. The bureaucracy that destroyed the European Jews was remarkably decentralized, and its most far reaching actions were not always initiated from the top. Officials serving in middle or even in lower positions of responsibility were producers of major ideas. Every once in a while, a particular set of recommendations would be approved by a superior and become a policy, authorization or directive. Such, often enough, was the genesis of an "order". To sum up, Milgram's approach does not provide a wholly adequate account of the Holocaust. Both the laboratory evidence and the historical details of the destruction of European Jewry raise doubts about the fit between Milgram's conceptual model of obedience to authority and the actualities of the Holocaust. Clearly, there was more to the genocidal Nazi program than the dispassionate obedience of the average citizen who participated in the murder of his fellow citizens who were Jewish out of a sense of duty and not malice. At the same time, it could not have succeeded to the degree that it did without the passive or active complicity of everyone. While Milgram's approach may well account for their dutiful destructiveness, it falls short when it comes to explaining the more zealous hate-driven cruelties that also defined the Holocaust. But regardless of degree of fit, in trying to find an explanation for the Holocaust, Milgram created a laboratory paradigm that stands out as the foremost example of creative experimental realism applied to a question of profound social and moral significance. Furthermore, his work has helped maintain and spread an awareness of the Holocaust. There are probably hundreds of thousands of students who first learned about the Holocaust through exposure to the obedience experiments in the introductory psychology course. References: Arendt, Hannah (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking. Aronson, Elliot (1984). The Social Animal 4th Ed. New York: W.H. Freeman and Co. Berger, Leslie (1983). "A Psychological Perspective on the Holocaust: Is Mass Murder Part of Human Behavior" In Randolph Braham, ed. Perspectives on the Holocaust; Boston: Kluwer-Nijhof. Blass, T. (1984). Social Psychology and Personality: Toward A Convergence. Journal of Personality and Sociual Psychology 47: 1013-27. Blass, T. (1991) Undersstanding Behavior in the Milgram Obedience Experiment: The Role fo Personality, Situations and Their Interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60: 398-413 Blass, T. ed. (2000). Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm . NJ: Lwarence Erlbaum. Blass, T. (2004). The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books. Hartwell, Steven (1990). Moral Development. Ethical Conduct and Clinical Education. New York Law School Law Review 35(1): 131-161. Hilberg, Raul (1980) " The Nature of the Process" in Joel Dimsdale, ed. Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. Wshington, D.C.: Hemisphere. Hirsch, H. and Spiro, D. eds. (1988). Persistent Prejudice: Perspectives on Anti Semitism. Virginia: George Mason University Press Kelman, H. and Hamilton, L. (1989). Crimes of Obedience: Toward a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. New Haven: Yale University Press. Milgram, S. (1992). The Individual in a Social World: Essays and Experiments. New York: McGraw-Hill. Milgram, Stanley (1974). Obedience to Authority : An Experimental View: New York: Harper and Row. Milgram, Stanley (1963) Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal or Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67(4): 371-378 Miller, A. (1986) The Obedience Experiments: A Case Study of Controversy in Social Science. New York: Praeger. Mixon, D. (1971). "Further Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority". Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Nevada. Mixon, D. (1972). Instead of Deception. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 2: 145-77. Mixon, D. (1979). "Understanding Shocking and Puzzling Conduct", in Geral Ginsburg, ed. Emerging Strategies in Social Psychological Research. New York. Wiley. Sabini, John and Silver, Maury (1980). "Destroying the Innocent with a Clear Conscience: A Sociopsychology of the Holocaust". In Joel Dimsdale, ed. Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust. Wshington, D.C.: Hemisphere. Wiesenthal, Simon (1989). Justice not Vengeance. New York: Grove Weidenfield. Appendix Read More