ALAMYthe land of his birth. A young Asch moved with his family from
Poland to the United States. Tajfel, also Polish-born but later a
student in France, volunteered to fight for the French when war
broke out but was captured by the Germans; how he survived de-
tention remains a mystery, though it probably entailed keeping
his Jewishness secret. Born in Romania, Moscovici survived in-
ternment in a forced-labour camp during the war before moving
to France. He witnessed the Bucharest pogrom of 1941, during
which mobs stormed Jewish homes, raping, murdering, and in-
flicting torture too barbaric to describe. The memories played
on Moscovici’s nerves for the rest of his life. All five men lost rel-
atives in the war. Virtually Tajfel’s entire family was murdered,
including his mother, father and brother. In later life he found it
almost impossibly painful to speak in his mother tongue.
The immigrants naturally retained an outsider’s sensibility.
All combined a strong Jewish identity with a weak attachment
to religious doctrine, though in some cases that changed with
age. In 1977, Milgram humorously declined a university meet-
ing that had been fixed for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year),
replying with the quip: “Sorry for the inconvenience, but this
particular holiday was scheduled 5,738 years ago, and therefore
has my prior commitment.”
A discipline of deception
In trying to comprehend the Holocaust, social psychologists
sought a variety of explanations. Milgram, as we’ve seen, was in-
terested in obedience and the extent to which people’s conscienc-
es provide any check on our deference to authority. By contrast,
what fascinated Solomon Asch was how we are swayed by opin-
ion: will we go along with something if everyone else does? He
tested this in his conformit y experiments, which went like this.
Imagine that you are the subject. You arrive in the lab
to participate in what you’ve been told is an experiment about
perception. You are given a seat in a room in which six other
volunteers are already seated. The test is apparently straightfor-
ward. Two cards are held up. On the first card is one line; on
the second card are three lines. You merely have to say which of
the lines on the second card, labelled 1 2 and 3, is the same
length as the line on the first one.
All seven of you give the same answer. The experiment
is then repeated with different lines. Again, the response is
unanimous. But then something weird happens. On the third
go, everyone else gives an answer which seems obviously wrong:
they say 2, when it appears to you that the answer must be 3.
Are your eyes deceiving you? How do you respond?
Asch observed that those who took part in the experiment
found the experience – seeing others contradict clear evidence
right before their eyes – an unnerving one. A remarkable num-
ber of people were influenced by what everyone else said. As you
have by now very likely guessed, the other six participants in
Asch’s study were actors, in experimental terms called ‘confed-
erates’, pretending to be genuine volunteers.
Psychology of the Holocaust
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY’S
PIONEERS THOUGHT
A LITTLE DECEPTION
WAS A PRICE WORTH
PAYING, GIVEN WHAT
WAS AT STAKE
Pioneer psychologist
Kurt Lewin, considered the
founding father of social
psychology. Born in Germany but
choosing to move to the US after
Hitler came to power, Lewin’s work
led to wider understanding of the
concept of group dynamics