Psychology of the HolocaustI
f you were instructed to inflict pa in on a not her person in
the cause of an academic experiment, how far would you
go? If that person was in agony, pleading with you to
stop, would you persist nonetheless? That’s the question
that Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test.
The year is 1961. Milgram has lured subjects to his
laboratory with the promise of $4 for an hour’s work. An
advertisement claims that participants will assist in a
study on memory. When a volunteer turns up, they’re joined by
a second ‘volunteer’ and the two people draw lots to choose
who’s to be the ‘learner’ and who the ‘teacher’. Unbeknown to
the genuine volunteer, it’s all a setup. The genuine volunteer is
given the role of teacher. The learner is an actor.
A man in a white lab coat explains how the experiment will
proceed. The teacher will sit in one room, the learner (the actor) in
a separate booth. The learner is strapped into a chair and hooked
up to an electricity generator. In front of the teacher is a set of
small switches. The teacher is told that his job (in this experiment
it’s always a ‘he’) is to read out pairs of words that the learner has
to remember and then repeat. If the learner gets it wrong, the
teacher must administer an electric shock. After the first mistake,
he is to flick the first switch, delivering 15 volts; after the second
mistake, he pulls the second – 30 volts, and so on. The final
switch, 450 volts, is marked ‘danger – severe shock’.
When Milgram declared his results, they delivered another
form of shock. Despite the screams from the booth, and despite
expressing reservations about the suffering they were inflicting
on ‘learners’, nearly two thirds of ‘teachers’ had been prepared to
go all the way – eventually tripping the switch marked 450 volts.
The experiment made Milgram famous – or at least as fa-
mous as is possible for an academic working within what was
then an obscure and relatively new branch of psychology,
a branch that had emerged from hatred and war.Understanding evil
Stanley Milgram was born on 15 August 1933, just months af-
ter Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Both of Milgram’s
parents were Jewish immigrants to the US, and close relatives
remained in eastern Europe. During the Second World War,
the family would gather round the radio listening fretfully to
the news, wondering what had become of Stanley’s aunts.
The full extent of the atrocities perpetrated against Jewish
people and other minorities became apparent only at the war’s
end. Six million Jews systematically exterminated: how was this
possible? How could people have starved, tortured and mur-
dered other men, women and children on an industrial scale?
How could entire groups have been so dehumanised? How
could millions of bystanders have allowed it to happen?
In 1961, several thousand miles from Milgram’s lab in Yale
University in Connecticut, a reminder of the Holocaust ap-
peared daily in Jerusalem: a bald, bespectacled, innocuous-
looking man in a suit sitting in a glass booth. That man was ALAMYTHE EXPERIMENT
BECAME FAMOUS IN
A NEW BRANCH OF
PSYCHOLOGY – ONE THAT
EMERGED FROM HATRED
AND WAR
A call for participants in one of Stanley
Milgram’s pioneering 1960s studies – not,
in fact, of memory but of the extreme actions
that might result from obedience to authority