Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiments: Towards an Understanding of Their Relevance in Explaining Aspects of the Nazi Holocaust

摘要

Two leading Holocaust historians, Yehuda Bauer and Christopher Browning, have in recent years independently asked how so many ordinary Germans (most of whom in the 1930s hadbeen moderately anti-Semitic) could become by the early 1940s willing murderers of Jews.Social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, had years before been interested in finding answers tosimilar questions, and to that end in the early 1960s carried out his widely debated "Obedienceto Authority" (OTA) experiments at Yale University. Drawing on previously unpublishedmaterial from Milgram's personal archive at Yale, this thesis investigates how Milgramdeveloped his research idea to the point where, by the time he ran his first official experiment,he was able to convert the majority of his ordinary subjects into torturers of other people. It is argued that Milgram's experiments were in themselves structured as a bureaucraticmicrocosm, and say less about obedience to authority, per se, than about the ways in whichpeople in an organisational context resolve a pressing moral dilemma. The thesis uses insightsgained from Milgram's experimental innovations to assist in answering the question posed byBauer and by Browning, focusing on the Nazis' progressive development of mass killingmethods, from 1941 to 1944, during Operation Barbarossa and Operation Reinhard. It isshown how these methods were designed to diminish perpetrators' perceptual stimulation, inorder to make the "undoable" increasingly "doable", in ways that were later reflected in Milgram's development of his own experimental methodology.