Mick Hartley

Here’s an article in the latest issue of the British Psychological Society journal, “Questioning the banality of evil” (via Metafilter). As the title indicates, it’s a re-examination of the established view, supposedly originating with Hannah Arendt and her book on Eichmann, and supported by experiments like those of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, that we’re all susceptible to the power of the group and given half a chance will follow like sheep behind even (especially?) the most barbaric of leaders.

The re-examination, it has to be said, is not that radical. On Eichmann, and the banality of evil that Arendt identified, for instance:

In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.

Which conclusion, to my mind, isn’t so much an argument against Arendt as an indication that they’re setting up a straw Arendt, as it were, and misrepresenting what she actually said. She never claimed that Eichmann wasn’t aware of what he was doing: rather that he saw himself as a mere functionary, just doing his job.

The authors go on to question some of the assumptions of the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, and much of what they say is interesting. But again their conclusion is less than revolutionary:

Until recently, psychologists and historians have agreed that ordinary people commit evil when, under the influence of leaders and groups, they become blind to the consequences of their actions. This consensus has become so strong that it is repeated, almost as a mantra, in psychology textbooks and in society at large. However critical scrutiny of both historical and psychological evidence – along with a number of new studies, e.g. Krueger (in press); Staub (in press) – has produced a radically different picture. People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.

As before I can’t help thinking that they’re misrepresenting what they identify as the consensus, and as a result end up making their own position that much more “radically different”. Just as Arendt never doubted that Eichmann knew what he was doing, so later psychologists haven’t in general argued that people who commit evil “become blind to the consequences of their actions”. The authors’ conclusion, that “people do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right”, comes across in the end – as so much of this kind of psychology tends to – as a great big clunking statement of the bleeding obvious.

I don’t doubt that experiments like Milgram’s or Zimbardo’s are of interest. I’m not going to repeat all the arguments here – I’ve already posted about Milgram, here and here, and about Zimbardo here. It still seems to me that the most significant lessons we learn from those experiments, in terms of the propensity for people to do evil, aren’t about the behaviour of the subjects, but rather concern the behaviour of the psychologists who ran the experiments. In both cases the subjects were put through lengthy experiences that were deeply upsetting, in many cases traumatic and humiliating, often with lasting consequences to their mental health. The psychologists who then went on to pontificate at length on the failings of these wretches, and not incidentally made names for themselves by so doing, never for a moment doubted the propriety of what they did. In terms of human suffering in general this may be minor stuff, but it nicely demonstrates how people can inflict suffering on others “because they consider it to be right”.