A new BBC radio documentary explores the effect of the Holocaust on five leading social psychologists on both sides of the Atlantic – Kurt Lewin, Henry Tajfel, Serge Moscovici, Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram.
Of the five, Stanley Milgram and his obedience to authority experiments are the most famous. But the work of the other four explored similar themes, albeit using different methods.
How and why of perpetrators and bystanders
Lewin’s experiments with groups of children tried to pinpoint how leaders of groups shape their members’ behaviour. Tajfel looked at discrimination between ingroups and outgroups. Moscovici focussed how outspoken individuals can influence opinion and Asch studied how fear of being marginalised puts people under pressure to conform.
All five were Jewish and used social psychology to explore and explain the behaviour of perpetrators and bystanders during the Holocaust.
Stanley Milgram
In the case of Milgram, the link he made to understanding the Holocaust which he made in his earliest publications about his research has insulated his research from criticism. But since his research materials were made available at Yale, scholars have been able to examine the way he actually conducted the research and revise the conclusions he drew from it.
Stanley Milgram’s most prominent critics psychiatrist Martin Orne and psychologist Diana Baumrind were also Jewish.
Psychiatrist Martin Orne questioned the validity of Stanley Milgram’s obedience research.
Archival research has since proved that Orne’s concerns about the validity of the obedience experiments and Baumrind’s concern for the welfare of Milgram’s subjects were well founded despite Milgram’s claims to the contrary.
Following orders?
But as the recent BBC documentary and my own research into the Milgram archives demonstrate, scientists are just as susceptible to ego and ambition as the rest of us.
In his haste to link his research to the pressing problem of the Holocaust and in particular, to link his work to philosopher Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil Milgram misrepresented his findings. He argued that most of us will blindly obey orders from an authority figure even when those orders conflict with our conscience. In fact Milgram’s data shows the opposite, the majority of his subjects disobeyed.
Scientists’ blind spots
The irony is that social psychologists of the era rarely applied the findings of social psychology to their own research or considered how pressures to conform, social influence and the desire for recognition and belonging shaped their research. Unearthing these hidden influences is the job of the historian and researchers who follow.
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