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      The Milgram-Holocaust Linkage: Challenging the Present Consensus

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            Abstract

            Stanley Milgram's assertion that his “Obedience to Authority” (OTA) experiments replicated, in a laboratory setting, quintessential features of perpetrator behaviour during the Holocaust has been widely challenged. Most contemporary scholarship on this issue, known as the “Milgram-Holocaust (M-H) linkage”, argues that Milgram's experiments failed to capture important factors such as ideology, policy, bureaucracy and technology, which more fully explain perpetrator behaviour. However, it is argued here that when the obedience research programme is viewed from a different angle – that of being an emerging policy-driven bureaucratic process in pursuit of “scientific” goals with an impersonal means of inflicting harm – the interplay of factors such as ideology, policy, bureaucracy and technology did in fact play a central role in generating Milgram's high baseline completion rate. Hence, there is a much stronger theoretical connection between the OTA experiments and the Nazi state's perpetration of the Holocaust than the current scholarly consensus allows.

            Content

            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.13169
            statecrime
            State Crime Journal
            Pluto Journals
            20466056
            20466064
            1 October 2015
            : 4
            : 2
            : 128-153
            Affiliations
            [1 ] University of Calgary;
            [2 ] Victoria University of Wellington;
            Article
            statecrime.4.2.0128
            10.13169/statecrime.4.2.0128
            57f39455-7366-4d69-bcab-f3e5dca8c378
            © 2015 International State Crime Initiative

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Categories

            Criminology
            Milgram,authority,power,responsibility ambiguity,bureaucracy,shock generator,Holocaust,obedience

            Notes

            1. We argue that while Arendt's concept of the “banality of evil”, which she authored after watching Eichmann in the dock at his trial in Jerusalem, is in its own right a valid descriptor of much bureaucratic behaviour, we also agree with ( 2014), ( 2014) and others that Eichmann was hardly a good example of it, as he was most certainly a thoughtful and committed official, personally dedicated to his exterminationist task. However, whether or not Eichmann was a good example of the “banality of evil” is largely irrelevant to our arguments about the M-H linkage.

            2. The profile of the New Baseline condition is as follows. A confederate of Milgram's, posing as a potential participant, enters a laboratory where they are greeted by another confederate dressed in a lab coat, hereafter called the experimenter. The ostensible participant is then introduced to a waiting naïve, and actual, participant. The experimenter tells both persons that the project they have volunteered to take part in is designed to investigate the effects of punishment on learning. They are then told that one person is required to be the teacher and the other the learner. The selection is rigged to ensure that the confederate is always made the learner and the participant the teacher. The three men enter a small chamber where the participant is asked to help strap the learner to a chair and the experimenter attaches an electrode to his arm. The learner mentions having a slight heart condition. The experimenter explained that the shocks may be painful but that they would cause no permanent tissue damage. The participant is then taken into an adjacent room and placed before the shock generator. The shock generator has 30 switches, aligned in 15-volt increments from 15 to 450 volts. The participant is given a sample 45-volt shock and is then instructed by the experimenter, standing nearby, to give the learner a shock each time an incorrect answer is proffered. Each incorrect answer warrants for the learner a shock one level higher than its predecessor. Once the experiment has started, the learner frequently provides incorrect answers and the experimenter insists that despite the intensifying shocks, the participant continues up the shock board. In fact, no shocks at all are being administered, though the participant does not know this. Through standardized tape recordings, the learner made explicit references to his heart condition at the 150-, 195- and 330-volt switches. From the 345-volt switch onwards, the learner's increasingly excruciating reactions to the apparent shocks suddenly stop giving the impression that he had, at least, been rendered unconscious. The experimenter commands the participant to treat any unanswered questions as incorrect and accordingly to inflict the next level of shock. Once the participant has administered three successive shocks of 450 volts, they are considered “obedient” and the experiment is stopped.

            3. As outlined in the Guide to the Stanley Milgram Papers: Manuscript Group Number 1406, the SMP is held at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library and covers the period 1927–1986. The archive is arranged in five series: General Files (1954–1985), Studies (1927–1984), Writings (1954–1993), Teaching Files (1960–1984) and Data Files (1960–1984). The five series contain information on Milgram's research into obedience, television violence, urban psychology and communication patterns within society. The archive consists of both textual and non-textual materials (drawings, pictures and a few boxes of audiotapes).

            4. Conversely, when outcomes are positive everyone will seek to take credit for them. As President John F. Kennedy is said to have ruefully observed after the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster, “Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan”.

            5. The only exception to this rule was the Change of Personnel condition, in which Milgram tried to determine the influence of his usual experimenter/learner team.

            6. In terms of the coercive force of bureaucratic momentum, consider the experience of Wes Kilham, who in the early 1970s performed the experimenter role in an Australian obedience studies replication:“It was traumatic, difficult. I started disliking it very early on in the piece.” He confessed that he probably would have quit if he had been a staff member. But he was three-quarters of the way through his honours year. “There were demands on me to complete the damn thing, and it was too late to turn around and choose another topic. I was trapped into thinking I had to see it through.” ( 2012: 344– 345)

            7. As ( 1974: 142) said,When subjects enter the laboratory and are told to perform, they do not in a bewildered fashion cry out, “I never heard of science. What do you mean by this?” Within this situation, the idea of science and its acceptance as a legitimate social enterprise provide the overarching ideological justification for the experiment. […] Ideological justification is vital in obtaining willing obedience, for it permits the person to see his behavior as serving a desirable end.

            8. ( 1974: 187) noted when discussing historical examples of so-called obedience to authority, “Indeed, the repeated requests for authorization are always an early sign that the subordinate senses, at some level, that the transgression of a moral rule is involved”.

            9. Milgram's own evidence suggests that it is very unlikely participants would have inflicted intensifying shocks on their own accord: In the Subject Chooses Shock Level condition, the participants determined the intensity of punishment, and 97.5 per cent repeatedly inflicted low-level shocks ( 1974: 70– 72).

            10. This separation was important because of any legal or social consequences to the “teacher” that might have flowed from the “learner” being hurt. As Arendt ( 1977: 135) said of Eichmann, in obeying orders he was “… always so careful to be ‘covered’ …” The pseudonymous participant Fred Prozi also sensed he was covered when he inquired after the 375-volt switch, “You accept all responsibility?” The experimenter responded, “The responsibility is mine. Correct. Please go on'” ( 1974: 76).

            11. It could be argued that in the Touch-Proximity (T-P) variation, the “teacher” was harming the “learner” directly, in having to force the latter's hand on to the shock plate. We suggest, however, that in our hypothetical situation the compliance rate would have been much less than the 30 per cent rate in the T-P condition, because the act of punching a person is much more physically violent.

            12. Because Milgram's subject first had to be motivated to deploy the shock generator, this device was not in itself a sufficient condition in the production of Milgram's high completion rates.

            13. The “zone of indifference” refers to orders which are unquestioningly accepted by organization members, as distinct from orders which will definitely be regarded as unacceptable. Other commands may be relatively neutral.

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