the orders of the ‘teacher’ were relayed by phone rather than in
person. Overall, taking into account all variations, the majority
of people in Milgram’s experiments defied the experimenters, or
at least failed to follow all instructions. Still, despite some criti-
cal reappraisal, the social psychology fashioned in the shadow of
the Holocaust successfully mapped out the discipline. The clas-
sic early studies on obedience and conformity and group dis-
crimination still define the contours of social psychology today.
Social psychology is currently beset by a ‘replication crisis’.
Attempts to replicate many headline-grabbing recent studies
have failed. According to one of Britain’s leading social
psychologists, Steve Reicher, the problem is that these days
many socia l psychologists ta ke a cava lier attitude to publication
because they lack passion. For them, Reicher argues, social psy-
chology is a career; beyond that, there is little personal at stake.
Nobody could level that charge at the pioneers. They were
desperate to tackle racism and discrimination. “It was not
in their interest to publish something they didn’t believe,” says
Reicher, “because it would get in the way of a science that could
make a difference”. For the
founders of social psychology,
whose relatives had been mur-
dered in the ditches and camps
of Europe in the Holocaust,
understanding the science of
evil was literally a matter of life
IN and death.
TE
RN
ET
AR
CH
IV
E
Deception was at the heart of many other social psychology
experiments. Moscovici used a deceptive setup to investigate
whether minorities could influence the majority. His subjects
were asked to distinguish between green and blue slides;
Moscovici recorded how they were affected by a couple of con-
federates giving the wrong answer.
Tajfel first asked a group of boys to rate a set of paintings;
they were then separated into a (Paul) Klee group and a (Wassily)
Kandinsky group, and were told that this division was based on
their assessment of the paintings. In fact, they were split up at
random. They were then given money to share out among boys
from both groups. Tajfel’s ingenious experiment revealed how
easily humans divide into groups and then discriminate against
other groups.
No doubt the pioneers of social psychology thought that a
little deception and some discomfort among their subjects was a
price worth paying, given what was at stake. Perhaps they are
right, though not everyone agrees. Some of Milgram’s subjects
were traumatised: one man later described how he would scan
the obituaries of the newspapers to see if the person who had
been electrocuted had died.
Ethical concerns are among the reasons why some of these
experiments are now being reconsidered with a more critical
eye. In some cases, the results are also being reinterpreted. It’s
been alleged that Milgram was loose with his recording and
publishing of the data. He repeated the experiment several
times, adjusting it in minor ways: for example, in one variationDavid Edmonds is a writer and
BBC journalist. Listen to The
Science of Evil, his Archive on 4
programme on social psychology,
at: bbc.co.uk/
programmes/m000drbxThe social order
Boys are given instructions in one of Kurt
Lewin’s seminal experiments on the impact
of various leadership styles. His focus on the
influence on the individual over others was at
the heart of new ideas of social psychology