However, there are variants of
Milgram’s classic paradigm which tend
to get overlooked and which do resurrect
some belief in the good of humanity.
In follow-up experiments, Milgram
contrived a situation in which partici-
pants witnessed another participant
- actually an actor – resist the order to
apply ever-higher electric shocks. With
this role-model, participants were far
less likely to obey the experimenter. It
was a similar story in variations of Asch’s
experiments. Once again, all it took was
a single rebellious ally to inspire far
greater autonomy in participants. Just
as Reicher and Haslam found in their
prison study, the right kind of example,
it seems, can inspire virtuous resistance
rather than tyranny.
The bystander effect
It’s 1964 in the Kew Gardens district of New York, and Kitty Genovese,
a 28-year-old bar manager, is returning home after work. A man fatally
attacks her outside a large apartment block. There are 38 witnesses in
the block, or so the traditional account goes, yet not one of them does
anything to help. The incident provokes moral outrage and inspires
the psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley to propose and test
the “bystander effect” – the idea that people’s sense of responsibility
is diluted when they are in a group. If there had been just one witness
to Genovese’s murder, their theory suggests, they would probably have
intervened in some way. Yet tragically, the abundance of witnesses left
everyone thinking that someone else can deal with it. Many of us have
encountered a less dramatic equivalent on a busy shopping street. A
person falls and the majority walk on by, reassuring themselves that
someone else is surely bound to help out.
But the traditional version of the Kitty Genovese tragedy has been
challenged. Research by local historian Joseph De May, much of it based
on transcripts of the trial of Genovese’s killer Winston Mosely, suggests
there weren’t 38 witnesses after all. In fact, probably only one person saw
Hannah Arendt reported on the
1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one
of the main Nazi organizers of
the Holocaust. She claimed that
Eichmann was more of a careerist
than an anti-Semite, a position
that has been challenged by later
historians.