Evil not banal, says disturbing study
Some form of identification, and hence choice, generally underpins all tyrannical behaviour
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2014-09-09 03:24 GMT
Ingham Paris: Commanded by an authoritarian figure, and wishing to conform, we could bulldoze homes, burn books, separate parents from children or even slaughter them, and our much-prized conscience would not as much as 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.
“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 behaviour.” Their detective work focused on legendary experiments conducted in 1961 by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Volunteers, told they were taking part in an experiment on learning, were led to believe they were administering an electric shock to a man, dubbed the “learner” who had to memorise pairs of words. Every time the learner made a mistake, the “teacher” was told by a stern 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. 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.