Stanley Milgram, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The question people rarely pause over, because they think the answer is obvious. It was not curiosity about electricity. The starting point was the Holocaust — not as metaphor but as historical fact demanding psychological explanation. Millions were killed through the organized, bureaucratic cooperation of ordinary Europeans: soldiers, functionaries, railway workers, administrators.
The comfortable account, the one that lets the rest of us sleep, holds that these were monsters, a sadistic fringe, evil incarnate. Hannah Arendt attended the Eichmann trial and came back with a different report: the man at the desk was an uninspired bureaucrat who did his job.1 When I read hundreds of ordinary people — drawn from working, managerial, and professional classes — submit to authority in New Haven, I found I had to agree with her.2
The banality of evil is not a literary phrase. It is a finding. But Arendt worked from a trial transcript. I wanted a controlled test of the mechanism. What actually happens, under specifiable conditions, when a legitimate authority instructs an ordinary person to act against another? The laboratory was the instrument for isolating that question from the noise of ideology, history, and national character.
The experiment strips the situation to its structural essentials: a hierarchy, an instruction, a victim, and a person caught between them. The finding that came back was not reassuring. Almost two-thirds of participants went to the maximum level.3 That number matters because it defeats the fringe hypothesis outright. And the behavior did not stem from aggression or sadism — when subjects in a control condition were free to choose any shock level they wished, they clustered at the bottom of the scale, the mean landing at 3.6.4
The destructive acts were not expressions of the actors' own motives; they were initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the hierarchy.5 The deeper claim is this: what the laboratory makes visible is a general process, not a local curiosity. The psychological experiment shares its essential structural properties with every situation composed of subordinate and superordinate roles.6
Soldier, employee, party functionary, obedient subject — what runs through all of them is the same limitless capacity to yield, and the same mental mechanisms for reducing the strain of acting against a helpless person.7 That is what the investigation probes. That is why it was worth doing.
Arendt contended that the prosecution's effort to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster was fundamentally wrong, that he came closer to being an uninspired bureaucrat who simply sat at his desk and did his job.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
subjects were free to use any shock level they wished, and the experimenter took pains to legitimize the use of all levers on the board. Though given full opportunity to inflict pain on the learner, almost all subjects administered the lowest shocks on the control panel, the mean shock level being 3.6.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
It is the essence of obedience that the action carried out does not correspond to the motives of the actor but is initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the social hierarchy.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
The occasion we term a psychological experiment shares its essential structural properties with other situations composed of subordinate and superordinate roles.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View
What we find in common among soldier, party functionary, and obedient subject is the same limitless capacity to yield to authority and the use of identical mental mechanisms to reduce the strain of acting against a helpless victim.Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View