Study takes issue with 'banality of evil' theory

What prompts ordinary people to commit acts of evil?

The question has been debated by philosophers, moralists, historians and scientists for centuries.

One idea that carries a lot of weight today, based on experiments 50 years ago, is this: Almost anyone is capable of carrying out an atrocity if ordered to do so. Commanded by an authoritarian figure and wishing to conform, people will bulldoze homes, burn books, separate parents from children and even kill-and their much-prized human conscience will barely flicker.

Called the "banality of evil," the theory has been proffered as an explanation for why ordinary, educated Germans took part in the Jewish genocide of World War II.

Now psychologists, having reviewed the opinion-shaping experiments of a half-century ago, are calling for a rethink.

"The more we read and the more data we collect, the less evidence we find to support the banality of evil idea - the notion that participants are simply 'thoughtless' or 'mindless' zombies who don't know what they're doing and just go along for the sake of it," said Alex Haslam, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.

"Our sense is that some form of identification, and hence choice, generally underpins all tyrannical behavior."

Their detective work focused on legendary experiments conducted in 1961 by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in which volunteers were told they were taking part in an experiment on learning, and they would be the "teachers". The teachers were led to believe they were administering an electric shock to a man, dubbed the "learner", who had to memorize pairs of words.

Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was told by astern-faced, lab-coated official to crank up the shock, starting with a mild 15 volts and climaxing at a lethal 450 volts.

The experiment was fake the learner was an actor, and the shocks never happened. The teacher (the real subject of the experiement) could hear, but not see, the learner.

Frighteningly, in one test, nearly two-thirds of volunteers continued all the way to "lethal" voltage, even when the learner pleaded for mercy, wept or screamed in apparent agony.

The experiments became enshrined in textbooks as an illustration of how the conscience can be put on hold under the power of authority, or "orders".

The findings meshed with a landmark book by the writer Hannah Arendt about the 1961 trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, a chief architect of the Holocaust, whose testimony in his defense is often summed up as "I was following orders".

Far from the monster she had expected, Arendt found that Eichmann came across more like a petty bureaucrat, prompting her to coin the term "banality of evil" to suggest how ordinary people, by wanting to conform, could commit atrocities.

The new research, published in the British Journal of Social Psychology, took a closer look at Milgram's "teachers".

A team sifted through a box in the Yale archives that contained comments written by the volunteers after they were told the purpose of the experiment, and that the torture had been fake.

Of the 800 participants, 659 submitted a reaction. Some said they had felt unease or distress during the tests, but most reported being positive about the experience, some extremely so.

"To be part of such an important experiment can only make one feel good," said one participant.

"I feel I have contributed in some small way toward the development of man and his attitudes towards others," said another.

"If it [is] your belief that these studies will benefit mankind then I say we should have more of them," said another.

(China Daily 09/09/2014 page11)