Study title

We have run a series of studies that include two (ethical) paradigms of Milgram's obedience studies. The first, which takes place online, asks participants to assign increasingly negative adjectives to increasingly positive groups of people. Using this paradigm, we have used the following manipulations: 'Peers Rebel' feedback, identification with the experimenter by gender, identification with science by participants' background, identification with science by using the 'three things' manipulation, and identification with the 'learner' by reminding participants of shared priviledge. In the second paradigm, we use virtual reality to investigate helping behaviour and stress levels of the participants in a Milgram-like environment.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...