GETTY^ IMAGESAdolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who had been charged
with organising the mass deportation of Jews to their deaths
in concentration and extermination camps.
Eichmann’s trial captivated Israel. Fifteen years after the end
of the Second World War, the Holocaust remained a taboo sub-
ject. Few survivors had wanted to talk about their experiences;
in a perverse way, victimhood was considered almost shaming.
The Jewish German-born political philosopher Hannah
Arendt, in Jerusalem to cover the trial for The New Yorker, deliv-
ered her hugely contentious verdict on the accused: Eichmann
was an apparatchik – a mere functionary, a cog in a bureaucratic
system – and his evil was “banal”. Eichmann himself insisted he
had merely been “following orders”. It was not enough to save
him from a guilty verdict and the hangman’s rope.
But what of his defence? Is it possible that people do bad
things just because they’re told to? Was there something unique
in German culture that promoted or legitimised such blind
obedience? Initially, Milgram suspected so. It could never hap-
pen in the United States, he thought. But his experiments
convinced him of his naivety.
Obedience and betrayal
Milgram’s obedience experiments cemented the credentials of
social psychology, the discipline that investigates how our
thoughts, feelings and behaviour are influenced by others.
The man often credited as its founding father was the
German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin. He had been visiting
the US to deliver a series of lectures when Hitler became
Chancellor. Immediately grasping that his academic career at
home was over, he chose to move to the US, and eventually
found a position at the University of Iowa.
It was there that he conducted the experiment for which he
is best known. Struck by the difference between the political
atmosphere in Germany and that in his adopted country,
he devised a way to study how this affected behaviour. Boys
were invited to join craft-making clubs. Some of these clubs
were spearheaded by ‘democratic’ leaders who were decent
to the children and welcomed their input into decision-making.
Others were run in ‘totalitarian’ fashion: leaders barked curt
orders, and never explained their decisions or justified their
praise or blame.
The experiment produced intriguing results. For example,
when the group leader left the room, anarchy was more likely to
break out in the totalitarian group than the democratic one.
But in many ways what was more significant was the focus of
Lewin’s research – the influence on the individual of others –
combined with the experimental method.
Where Lewin led, many others followed – though, post-
Lewin, their experiments have tended to be conducted not in
a real-life setting but in the laboratory. There were numerous
psychologists I could have spotlighted in my recent BBC docu-
mentary but, besides Lewin and Milgram, I chose to emphasise
three: Solomon Asch, Serge Moscovici and Henri Tajfel.
As was the case with many other social psychologists of the
era, one thing the five men had in common was the Holocaust.
Milgram was the only one of the five not to be uprooted fromPsychology of the Holocaust
Exposing the horror
German citizens are forced to view
victims of Wöbbelin concentration
camp in 1945. Several early social
psychology experiments were
attempts to understand the
complicity of many Germans in
the horrors of the Holocaust