George R Mastroianni. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. Volume 22, Issue 2, 2002.
In the last five years, three substantive attempts to engage the legacy of the Milgram obedience studies have appeared. A special issue of The Journal of Social Issues entitled “Perspectives on Obedience to Authority: the Legacy of the Milgram Experiments” (Journal of Social Issues, 1995) provided a thorough and balanced appraisal of the important place Milgram occupies in contemporary psychology. A special issue of Analyse and Kritik (Analyse and Kritik, 1/98) offered contrasting views of Milgram’s relevance to the Holocaust from both social scientists and historians. Finally, a festschrift to Milgram and his remarkable work “Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm” (Blass, 2000) offered an appreciative summary of Milgram’s legacy. The perspective I will offer suggests that the interpretation of Milgram’s studies as integral to understanding the Holocaust, widespread in psychology texts, should be reconsidered based on recent developments in Holocaust scholarship.
How Does Psychology Portray Milgram and the Holocaust?
Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience (Milgram, 1974) are among the most widely known studies in modern psychology. Miller (1995) surveyed 50 introductory psychology, social psychology, and sociology books that mentioned the Milgram studies. Miller found that forty-three of the fifty mentioned Milgram in connection with the Holocaust. Miller reports that “well over half” made no reference to criticisms of the generalizability of Milgram’s findings, and of those that did mention such criticisms, “almost all took an explicitly pro-Milgram stance” (Miller, 1995, p 40).
A less systematic examination of leading introductory texts reveals that obedience and the Milgram studies are usually discussed at some length. The now conventional conclusion emphasized in these texts is that by manipulating aspects of the social situation, ordinary people can be induced to commit terrible crimes. The Holocaust is usually discussed only briefly, and is commonly depicted as having resulted from the unthinking obedience of ordinary and unwilling people to authority. Zimbardo and Gerrig (1999, p. 793) offer the following: “What made thousands of Nazis willing to follow Hitler’s orders and send millions of Jews to the gas chambers?.. Milgram’s research showed that the blind obedience of Nazis during World War II was…the outcome of situational forces that could engulf anyone.”
Against these interpretations, I will argue that the view of Milgram’s findings and the Holocaust common in psychology texts is in need of reexamination. Specifically, the conclusion that ordinary people can readily be induced to commit terrible crimes by manipulating short-term situational factors has been challenged, both on the basis of the social structure and interpersonal processes at work in the Milgram studies themselves (Nissani, 1990; Darley, 1995; Mandel, 1998; Fenigstein, 1998) and because the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators cannot readily be interpreted as essentially obedient behavior (Browning, 1992; Goldhagen, 1996; Mandel, 1998; Fenigstein, 1998).
While criticisms of the Milgram studies based on the particulars of the studies themselves have been voiced in psychology journals (Nissani, 1990; Darley, 1995; Lutsky, 1995) serious debate about the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators has taken place largely outside psychology (Browning, 1992; Goldhagen, 1996; Shandley, 1998). That this debate is crucial to evaluating the claim that Milgram’s studies are of explanatory significance for the Holocaust is implicit in the fact that one of the viewpoints represented in that debate (Browning’s) is often cited to support this claim. A competing viewpoint (Goldhagen’s) has not been as thoroughly represented in the discussion as it has unfolded in psychology. My purpose is to offer a more complete view, confronting more fully the range of thought on perpetrator behavior.
What Was the Origin of Milgram’s View of the Holocaust?
The contemporary construction of Milgram’s work in relation to the Holocaust is rooted in Milgram’s own interpretations and those of his supporters, and is based largely on an understanding of the psychology of Holocaust perpetrators advanced by Hannah Arendt (1964), though this very understanding has been the subject of substantial revision and criticism since the mid-60’s (Saltzman, 2000). This view of Holocaust perpetrators developed from Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem, during which he appeared (at least to Arendt) less the personification of evil than a somewhat pathetic functionary driven by the will of others. Arendt’s view of Eichmann, and by extension perpetrators in general, interleaved nicely with Milgram’s emphasis on the power of situational factors in producing horrific behavior in ordinary people.
Miller (1995) says of the relationship between Arendt and Milgram:
From an historical perspective, one sees them as having figured prominently in each other’s influence—Arendt’s speculative hypothesis receiving vivid support from Milgram’s contributions as a social scientist, and in turn, the obedience experiments regarded as illuminating in the context of Arendt’s powerful stature as historian and philosopher. (p 38)
Psychologists have generally accepted Arendt’s interpretation of the Holocaust as authoritative in basic texts. Eichmann is often discussed is psychology texts without direct reference to Arendt (Weiten, 2001, p.680) but the connection is sometimes made explicit, as in Smith, Bem and Nolen-Hoeksema (2001, p. 498):
From 1933 to 1945, millions of innocent people were systematically put to death in concentration camps in Nazi Germany. The mastermind of this horror, Adolf Hitler, may well have been a psychopathic monster. But he could not have done it alone. What about the people who ran the day-to-day operations… Were they all monsters, too? Not according to social philosopher Hannah Arendt (1963) who covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann… She described him as a dull, ordinary bureaucrat who saw himself as a little cog in a big machine. The publication of a partial transcript of Eichmann’s pretrial interrogation supports this view… This suggests that all of us might be capable of such evil…
Questions About Ecological Validity
Arendt’s work was controversial, and Milgram’s studies, too, soon became the subject of controversy. Shortly after the original obedience study appeared in print, Baumrind published a critical analysis of the Milgram studies, focussing on two areas: the ethics of the studies, and the ecological validity of the studies. Ethical issues associated with the Milgram studies continue to generate discussion, but are not our primary concern here. Baumrind (1964) anticipated the results of later empirical work when she questioned the generalisability of the studies to Nazi Germany:
…the parallel between authority-subordinate relationships in Hitler’s Germany and in Milgram’s laboratory is unclear. In the former situation the SS man or member of the German Officer Corps, when obeying orders to slaughter, had no reason to think of his superior officer as benignly disposed towards himself or their victims. The victims were perceived as subhuman and not worthy of consideration. The subordinate officer was an agent in a great cause. He did not need to feel guilt or conflict because within his frame of reference, he was acting rightly. It is obvious from Milgram’s own descriptions that most of his subjects were concerned about their victims and did trust the experimenter, and that their distressful conflict was generated in part by the consequences of these two disparate but appropriate attitudes. (p 423)
The Holocaust has been the subject of extensive study and intense disagreement among scholars from many fields. Lutsky (1995) describes two main streams of historical thought on the Holocaust, “intentionalism” and “functionalism”. Intentionalism emphasizes the hierarchical power structures in Nazi society, while functionalism focuses on the decentralized and distributed features of bureaucracy which may encourage individual and group activity (Shandley, 1998).
Lutsky concludes that psychology could be contributing a great deal more to understanding the Holocaust were obedience not the dominant theme in approaching it. Lutsky quotes Staub: “Milgram’s dramatic demonstration of the power of authority, although of great importance, may have slowed the development of a psychology of genocide, as others came to view obedience as the main source of human destructiveness”. (Lutsky, 1995, p63)
According to some, then, Milgram’s ready adoption of Arendt’s interpretation of perpetrator behavior, which fit neatly with his own evolving view of obedience, may have short-circuited the development of other approaches to understanding the Holocaust within psychology. More recently, Browning (1992) and Goldhagen (1996) have altered the terms of historical discussion, moving beyond intentionalism and functionalism to address the motivation of ordinary people who participated in the Holocaust. This development has brought into focus the actions and behavior of those segments of society in Nazi Germany most like Milgram’s subjects: ordinary people.
Milgram’s Vision
Milgram responded to Baumrind’s skepticism about the generalizability of the obedience studies immediately. Milgram (1964) conceded that there were vast differences between “obedience in the laboratory and in Nazi Germany” (p. 851), but questioned the importance of such considerations:
…Baumrind mistakes the background metaphor for the precise subject matter of investigation. The German event was cited to point up a serious problem in the human situation: the potentially destructive effect of obedience. But the best way to tackle the problem of obedience, from a scientific standpoint, is in no way restricted by ‘what happened exactly in Germany’… The real task is to learn more about the general problem of destructive obedience using a workable approach. Hopefully, such inquiry will stimulate insights and yield general propositions that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. (p 851)
The development of a laboratory model of obedience, in Milgram’s view, would make possible empirical and theoretical work on obedience that would improve our understanding of obedience in the Holocaust, and more generally. Milgram assumed that perpetrator behavior was obedient behavior, and that isolating obedient behavior in the laboratory where it could be systematically studied would contribute to a better understanding of obedient behavior outside the laboratory.
Psychology, Genocide, and Obedience
Milgram’s vision, though, of a robust experimental literature informing our understanding of obedience outside the laboratory has gone largely unfulfilled (Lutsky, 1995, p 63). Blass (2000) provides an incisive review of the empirical work on obedience done since Milgram’s original studies. This body of research has focussed on replicating Milgram’s findings and testing alternate explanations of his results based on procedural variations of the original paradigm; most is laboratory work, with relatively little emphasis on application to other events. Kelman and Hamilton (1989) did apply the label “crimes of obedience” to a variety of seemingly disparate historical events, such as the Iran-Contra controversy, the rejection of Judge Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, the Challenger disaster, and tampering with Chrysler vehicle odometers. But these examples seem to have little in common with the Holocaust.
Staub (2000) considers other examples of genocide, such as the Turkish Armenian genocide and the mass killings in Cambodia and Argentina, and more recently the genocide in Rwanda, but he does not approach them as primarily phenomena of obedience. Staub suggests the importance of economic, political, sociological, and other factors in the genesis of genocide.
Obedience and the Holocaust
While psychology’s approach to genocide has not developed as rapidly or as extensively as it might, the specific association between obedience and the Holocaust has survived, and Milgram clearly came to see the Holocaust as more than a background metaphor. For example, in a Sixty Minutes interview, Milgram (1979) said:
…on the basis of having observed a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments…if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town. (In Blass, 2000, p 36)
The idea that Americans, regardless of education, ideology, or morality could be turned into mass murderers by manipulating superficial aspects of the situation is one that is justifiably disturbing to many. This theme is repeated by Kalat (1995): “Milgram’s experiment told us something about ourselves we did not want to hear. No longer could we say, ‘Something like what happened in the Nazi concentration camps could never happen here’”. (p 556)”. “The most fundamental lesson of our study,’ Milgram noted, is that ‘ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process’” (In Myers, 2001, p 655)
Is There Empirical Evidence in Support of This Claim?
This troubling assertion cannot be tested directly with respect to Americans, but the historical record of Nazi Germany can, and has been, extensively studied by historians. Christopher Browning’s fascinating study of the men of a German Reserve Police Battalion operating in Poland (Browning, 1992) focussed attention on the role of those typical Germans, of whom relatively little had been written previously, in carrying out the Holocaust. Daniel Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, (Goldhagen, 1996) was based in part on some of the same archival material used by Browning, but Goldhagen arrived at very different conclusions.
The work of both Browning and Goldhagen is directly relevant to the question of whether and how Milgram’s obedience studies apply to the Holocaust. Browning’s work sometimes appears in discussions of Milgram, obedience, and the Holocaust in introductory texts (Myers, 2001) and is frequently cited by psychologists arguing in favor of the ecological validity of Milgram’s work with respect to the Holocaust (Miller, 1995; Blass, 2000; Saltzman, 2000).
Browning’s (1992) interpretation of the evidence he examined led him to view the Milgram studies as quite relevant to the Holocaust, though his acceptance of the explanatory value of the concept of obedience when considering the Holocaust was partial and qualified. Browning accepts that Milgram’s insights are applicable to the behavior of the policemen he studied, but avers that “the relevant differences [between the two situations] constitute too many variables to draw firm conclusions in any scientific sense” (p 173). Browning noted, for example, that perpetrators’ own justifications more commonly invoked conformity than obedience as explanations for their behavior, the reverse of Milgram’s suggestion. (Browning, 1992, p. 174). Browning (1992) found in the Zimbardo prison experiments important insights concerning perpetrator behavior in the absence of overt coercion (pp. 167-168).
Browning’s more recent work, partly based on new archival material, further clarifies his view of perpetrator behavior. He argues that the Germans who committed the atrocities fell into three categories: a “significant minority” of eager killers; a larger group “who complied with the policies of the regime more out of situational and organizational rather than ideological factors”; (Browning, 2000, p.175) and “a minority of men who sought not to participate in the regime’s racial killing” (Browning, 2000, p. 169). Of the “eager killers” Browning says:
They were indeed a significant minority, not a majority, and some were transformed by the situation in which they found themselves. But many were ideologically motivated men ready to kill Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich from the start. Situational/organizational/institutional forces played no key role in shaping their behavior… Their influence was far out of proportion to their numbers in German society. (Browning, 2000, p. 175)
In Ordinary Men, though, Browning does argue that similarities between the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators and Milgram’s subjects suggest a correspondence between behavior in the two situations. Specifically, Browning (1992, p. 175) observes that:
Direct proximity to the horror of the killing significantly increased the number of men who would no longer comply. On the other hand, with the division of labor and removal of the killing process to the death camps, the men felt scarcely any responsibility at all for their actions. As in Milgram’s experiment without direct surveillance, many policemen did not comply with orders when not directly supervised; they mitigated their behavior when they could do so without personal risk but were unable to refuse participation in the battalion’s killing operations openly.
This claim is repeated in recent analyses of Milgram’s work in the psychology literature. Saltzman (2000), for example, says,
…Browning reports that “direct proximity to the horror of the killing significantly increased the number of men who would no longer comply” (pp. 175-176). Milgram obtained similar findings in his experiments 1 through 4 (Milgram, 1974): As he brought the victim closer, obedience dropped significantly. Browning also makes a direct connection between Milgram’s Experiment 7 (experimenter absent) and the situation in which the police battalion reservists were not directly supervised (p. 176).
Ironically, Milgram’s discussion of differences between Holocaust perpetrators and his subjects suggests that he might not have expected a strong proximity effect in the former individuals, because of the degree to which they were responding to internalized representations of authority. But because this alleged similarity in behavior in the two cases is an important empirical justification offered by psychologists to support the claim of ecological validity for the obedience studies with respect to the Holocaust, it must be examined in detail.
Is the Behavior of Teacher and Perpetrator Similar?
Browning’s belief that compliance diminished with increasing proximity to the victim or decreasing proximity to authority must be based largely on the testimony provided by the members of the battalion, in which many claimed that they mitigated their actions when not under close observation. Browning offers a sophisticated discussion of the various potential sources of inaccuracy in this testimony (Browning, 1992, p 147), but accepts these limitations given the scope and detail of these particular reports. The men who gave this testimony to war crimes prosecutors were motivated to show themselves in a favorable light, and to avoid potential prosecution. Moreover, the testimony was given more than twenty years after the events had taken place.
A careful reading of Browning’s work renders generalizations about the putative similarity between the behavior of Milgram’s subjects and Holocaust perpetrators difficult to accept, however. Browning describes several kinds of “actions” in which the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 participated. The first, large scale massacres, were frequently carried out by individual German policemen shooting individual Jews. Some policemen (Browning estimates between 10% and 20%) opted out of shooting Jews during some of these actions (Browning, 1992, p 168). These instances of noncompliance are, at least in some cases, corroborated by testimony from other policemen and other records, as these actions were relatively well-organized and carefully orchestrated events involving a substantial proportion of the battalion, exposing many to the observation of peers and superiors.
A second type of action was the roundup and deportation of Jews to extermination camps. While the bulk of the killing was deferred to the staff of the camps, the roundups themselves were far from bloodless and benign. Policemen reported that it was standard practice to shoot the very young, elderly or sick, who might have excessively slowed the process, in their beds or homes. Many policemen reported mitigating the violence and cruelty of their actions during these roundups and deportations, where they operated in small groups under less direct supervision. Browning bases his assertion that diminished proximity to authority led to less compliance in part on the many reports of mitigation during these deportations by policemen to prosecutors. These reports are comparatively difficult to corroborate because of the nature of the deportations, involving as they did, smaller, less closely supervised groups of policemen operating more independently.
Later in the war, after most Jews in their area of operation had been killed or deported, the men of the battalion participated in a third type of action, so-called “Jew hunts” in which they scoured the surrounding forests for Jews in hiding and shot them on the spot. These actions generally involved small detachments of policemen, and were obviously characterized by the most personal and immediate kind of killing, and by close supervision by peers and superiors. Browning reports, however, that in the “Jew hunts” there was little need for any compliance. He quotes one of the members of the battalion:
Above all I must categorically say that for the execution commandos [the Jew hunts] basically enough volunteers responded to the request of the officer in charge… I must add further that often there were so many volunteers that some of them had to be turned away. (Browning, 1992, p 128)
While it would certainly seem reasonable to believe that some policemen did indeed mitigate their actions when not closely observed, the nature of the evidence makes the statement that there existed a quantitative difference in the amount of compliance taking place in the different situations difficult, if not impossible, to support. Browning does not offer a numerical estimate of noncompliance in the deportations that we can compare to the 10%-20% figure based on the rate of refusing during the mass shootings. Just such a quantitative comparison is necessary if we are to accept that the degree of compliance displayed was related to proximity to authority, however.
Even when the policemen did “opt out” of killing, as many were apparently able to and as some did, their behavior in so doing was dissimilar to that of Milgram’s subjects in that they did not justify refusal to participate out of either concern for the victim or moral qualms about their actions. Examples of perpetrators reporting such conflict exist, although Browning says: “Even twenty or twenty-five years later those who did quit shooting…overwhelmingly cited sheer physical revulsion against what they were doing as the prime motive but did not express any ethical or political principles behind this revulsion”. (Browning, 1992, p 73)
While the revulsion motivating the refusers may have had roots in principles only dimly perceived or poorly expressed, several have commented on the lack of moral tone in discussions of the time. Insofar as the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators was unreflective or even enthusiastic, it contrasts sharply with the emotional, principled conflicts that characterized Milgram’s subjects. Browning quotes a policeman:
I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway… Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn’t reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then… Only later did it first occur to me that [sic] had not been right. (p. 72)
The Nature of the Evidence
Both Browning and Goldhagen question the reliability of the testimony provided by the policemen, though to differing degrees and with different shortcomings in mind. A genuine risk in using historical evidence to assess the validity and applicability of psychological concepts is potential bias in selecting and interpreting this evidence. Goldhagen and Browning, unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, trade accusations of tendentious selection of evidence in their respective analyses. Goldhagen thinks Browning too ready to accept at face value testimony from perpetrators, while Browning thinks Goldhagen biases his analytic efforts by excluding self-exculpatory testimony offered by the perpetrators.
Clearly, though, the historical record as interpreted by Browning and Goldhagen yields different conclusions: Browning offers a qualified endorsement of Milgram’s claim of ecological validity for the obedience studies, but Goldhagen (1996) rejects the claim outright. Goldhagen sees in Milgram’s situationist perspective an impoverished account of perpetrator behavior, one that ignores the “propitious social and political context” in which apparently “obedient” acts are seen as depending on the actor’s perception that orders emanate from a legitimate authority, and that the orders do not contravene the “overarching moral order”. (Goldhagen, 1996, p 383)
Goldhagen offers an intriguing analysis of the historical record in which he examines the historical record to test hypotheses about the motivation of Holocaust perpetrators. He concludes that one key factor in enabling the Holocaust was the existence of “eliminationist anti-Semitism” in Germany during the Nazi era. In Goldhagen’s view it is simply not the case that the Holocaust could be reproduced in “any medium-sized American town”, as Milgram claimed, and as some introductory texts repeat, because American society is not characterized by acceptance of this ideology. Neither could it be reproduced in Germany today, for that matter: the social and political context has been radically transformed in Germany in the last decades. Goldhagen rejects the idea that the “situation”, narrowly defined in terms of the transient conditions that can be manipulated in a social psychology laboratory, possesses explanatory power for the horrific actions recorded during the Holocaust. We must consider more than the “person” or the “situation” to understand the Holocaust: we must also consider ideology and belief.
Goldhagen focuses on the “cognitive model” that Germans of the Nazi era constructed. This model was rooted in an eliminationist ideology that led to many of the choices made by perpetrators of the Holocaust. Understanding the cognitive model inherited, elaborated, and ultimately enacted during the Nazi era offers another, less situationist, lens through which to see the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators.
A Broader View of Obedience
There have also been criticisms of the ecological validity of the Milgram studies from within psychology. These criticisms (Nissani, 1990; Darley, 1995; Lutsky, 1995) focus on those aspects of the studies themselves that seem to lead to the particular behavior observed by Milgram. Darley suggests that “understandable social forces” present in the Milgram study shaped the behavior of subjects. Darley (1995) says:
…the actions of the subjects in the Milgram obedience studies are different in important ways from the actions of concentration camp executioners, or soldiers perpetrating massacres, but the psychological community’s presentation of these results no longer recognizes these differences.” (p 133)
Milgram (1974) did recognize and address these differences in behavior: “We saw how obedience dropped sharply when the experimenter was not present. The forms of obedience that occurred in Germany were in far greater degree dependent on the internalization of authority and were probably less tied to minute-by-minute surveillance”. (p 176)
Mandel (1998) and Fenigstein (1998) compare the behavior of Milgram’s subjects and the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators. Mandel notes that Holocaust perpetrators found themselves in situations characterized by circumstances that Milgram showed produced high defiance rates. These circumstances included explicit lack of consent from the victims, close proximity to the victim, distance from the authority figure, and the example of defiant peers. Despite the presence of these factors, which dramatically increased defiance rates in the Milgram studies, compliance rates of the German policemen were estimated by Browning at 80%-90% (Browning, 1992, p. 184), though Browning has suggested more recently that compliance rates might have been lower in other instances (Browning, 2000, p. 175). Fenigstein (1998) points out that even subtle situational differences among the various conditions in Milgram’s experiments led to dramatic differences in compliance. While the differences between the Milgram experiments as a whole and Nazi Germany are anything but subtle, Milgram and others have been quick to accept the generalizability of the research findings to the culturally, geographically, and temporally distant events of the Holocaust.
Obedience Reexamined
Where does this leave us in assessing the ecological validity of the Milgram studies with respect to the Holocaust? It seems clear that a contemporary view must acknowledge that there is substantial and legitimate controversy about the degree to which the historical record supports the assertion that obedience qua Milgram “showed that the blind obedience of Nazis during World War II was…the outcome of situational forces that could engulf anyone” (Zimbardo and Gerrig, 1999). Browning and Goldhagen offer more empirical analyses of the Holocaust, and offer a view of Holocaust perpetrators that challenges the earlier, popular image of Eichmann and other perpetrators as mere “desk murderers”, and confronts the gruesome reality of the Holocaust in it’s day-to-day ugliness. Both challenge the portrayal of the Holocaust found in many psychology texts, albeit differently.
It is certainly legitimate to evaluate the competing interpretations of the relevance of Milgram to the Holocaust made by Browning and Goldhagen, and to form an opinion about which is more convincing. To serve our students well, however, we should at least describe the alternative explanations and interpretations and represent the conclusions we draw as the product of a careful consideration of these competing points of view. We should also abandon the convenient but simplistic notion that there is, from a psychological viewpoint, a single or even a small set of likely explanations for the behavior of Holocaust perpetrators among which we should choose. Surely all of the possibilities mentioned above, and other ground not covered (such as psychopathology, avarice, careerism, and ignorance) apply to some of the many thousands who make up the heterogeneous group we refer to as “Holocaust perpetrators” (Mandel, 1998, pp.78-80).
Parables and Explanations
It is possible that much of psychology’s commitment to the ecological validity of the Milgram studies with respect to the Holocaust is not really based in the science itself, not derived from a careful and systematic comparison of the behavior of Milgram’s subjects and Holocaust perpetrators, but instead flows from the dramatic, even theatrical power of the studies to validate, legitimize, and popularize social psychology for students and others. Robinson (1985) has discussed the nature of some explanations in social psychology and psychoanalysis as exhibiting a narrative focus existing apart from and independent of empirical validation. The appeal of such explanations lies in the story they tell, not the data they explain. Kotre (1992) refers to these (including the Milgram studies) as “scientific parables”.
Others have mentioned this theatrical aspect of the Milgram legacy:
The ecological validity of the obedience paradigm, as considered in this review, resides inevitably in the constructions of Milgram’s experiments, in the meaning that this research holds for students and teachers… There is yet another ‘reality’ of the Milgram experiments that is difficult to articulate but impossible to deny. It is the inescapable, ‘larger than life’ aspect of these experiments, a quality that seems to elevate them to a different plane, where the usual criteria for appraising validity—i.e., more data, more contexts, more theory—are essentially superfluous. Because the ideas and images that these studies bring to mind are so compelling and laden with moral significance for many, there is an inclination to endow the Milgram experiments with a mystique or charisma, the ‘intellectual legacy’ referred to by Ross and Nisbett. (Miller, 1995, p 50).
Milgram himself appreciated the dramatic power of his studies (Milgram, 1974, p 198) and was receptive to the insights to be derived from drama. Social scientists should be especially vigilant in ensuring that this aspect of the studies does not retard systematic evaluation of the case for ecological validity on its merits. That systematic evaluation necessarily involves an assessment of the historical record of the Holocaust, a process that continues to unfold in a vital and lively debate about how and why perpetrators behaved as they did.