Beyond the 'banality of evil': a new understanding of conformity and atrocity

Since the end of the second world war, western social thought has been haunted by the shadow of the holocaust. In 1961 two events came together which have shaped our understanding of the human capacity for inhumanity. The first was the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and Hannah Arendt's subsequent book about Eichmann. She argued that, far from being a monster, what was truly terrifying about him was his ordinariness. She also argued that what made him capable of murdering millions was 'sheer inattention': Eichmann concentrated so hard on the details of his job that he lost sight of the consequences. This was summarised in her phrase 'the banality of evil'.
While the trial was in progress, Stanley Milgram was conducting his famous 'obedience' studies in Yale. Participants were asked to administer an escalating series of electric shocks to a learner each time he made an error in a learning experiment (actually the shocks were not real and the learner was a confederate of the experimenter). To his surprise, many participants went all the way to 450v. This seemed to provide experimental rigour to the notion that ordinary people can act in extraordinarily harmful ways. What is more, Milgram took on board Arendt's explanation of toxic obedience. In the face of authority, he argued, people enter an agentic state whereby they focus exclusively on how well they follow instructions.
This notion of the perpetrator as an 'inattentive bureaucrat' has come to dominate understanding of atrocity in psychology, across different academic disciplines and even in the public domain. It is regularly invoked by the media and commentators every time we see instances of toxic behaviour.
However, despite its dominance, the explanation is deeply flawed and cannot explain variations in levels of obedience, including within Milgram's own studies. Based on a reanalysis of these studiesand also on historical evidence, we have argued that perpetrators are 'engaged followers' rather than 'inattentive bureaucrats'. This has three elements: first, people identify with a cause. Second, the see the cause as noble. Third, they see the authority who tells them to inflict harm in the name of the cause as a legitimate representative. That is, people don't do wrong because they are unaware of what they do, but because they believe it to be right.
In this project, we will provide support for the 'engaged follower' perspective. The work has three elements. The first of these involves collecting new empirical data by employing innovative methods which overcome the ethical objections to Milgram's original research. We will start with conventional experimentation which examines how far people will go in derogating ever more benign groups. This allows us to investigate the impact of our core variables (identification with the cause, glorification of the cause, legitimacy of the representative) in a relatively benign setting. Next, we will draw on findings which show that people behave similarly in virtual reality simulations to conventional psychology experiments but without the same level of emotional intensity or distress. We will develop a virtual reality simulation of the Milgram paradigm and use it to, again, address the impact of our core variables on obedience. Finally, we will plan a full field study working with the police/armed services and drawing on exercises that would be conducted as a matter of course.
The second element will be to organise a series of seminars involving psychologists, historians and practitioners with a view to sharing latest understandings of obedience and atrocity and to create a critical mass of people who can challenge the authority of the 'banality of evil' perspective.
The third element involves dissemination to the public, both through involving the media in the seminar series, through producing a film to illustrate the 'engaged follower' perspective and also through producing a popular book aimed at a general audience.

This project is aimed to have impact at two levels. First, we aim to affect media and popular understanding of the nature of obedience and the human capacity for atrocity. This is the more immediate and direct form of impact. Second, we aim to affect the understandings and the practice of institutions for whom issues of mistreatment and abuse are potentially highly relevant - the police and the armed services in particular. The impact here is, for the moment, more long-term and indirect.
Popular understanding: Our impact on popular understanding will be achieved both directly though some of the specially designed outputs from our work (the film and the popular book) and also through contacts with the media.
We have a long record of working with mainstream media. For instance, our BBC Prison study was (as the name suggests!) conducted with the BBC and televised as four hour long documentaries. We have regularly contributed to a series of BBC television and radio programmes (e.g. The Today Programme, PM, All in the Mind, Thinking Allowed and Lent Broadcasts on Radio 4, Bang goes the theory on BBC1), we have written a number of pieces for the BBC website and also for a wide variety of print media, notably the Guardian Science Blog on a number of occasions. Specifically, our work on Milgram has featured both on the BBC website and the Guardian website. We have also worked closely with the Science Media Centre on a number of projects.
Through this work, we have developed excellent contacts which we aim to draw on in order to get media involvement in the seminar series. Alongside these seminars (or possibly as part of them), we will seek to set up a debate on 'conformity and atrocity' which will be co-sponsored by a media organisation and hence disseminated by them. In naddition to this, we are regularly contacted by the media on issues relating to obedience and we will continue to disseminate our ideas in this way.
Institutional practice: Over many years, we have worked with the police in order to feed our analyses of crowd behaviour into public order policies and practices. More recently we have worked with the armed services in contributing to the ethics component of their advanced command courses. The aim here is to provide an understanding of the factors which make abuse of host populations and of captives possible and thereby to guard against such abuse. Our research will feed directly to the lectures we give to the armed services. However, with stronger and more convincing evidence (especially in due course when the field study is completed) we hope to use our work to affect the training that personnel are given and also the operational procedures that are used in actual conflict situations (e.g. in Iraq and in Afganistan). While we do not envisage that we will be able to achieve such impact in the short term and directly out of the work done on this project, our hope is that the relationships created in this project and the future work to which it gives rise will enable us to have such impact in due course.