Adolf Eichmann War criminal WWII Nazi Germany WWII ..., Study notes of Religion

Download Adolf Eichmann War criminal WWII Nazi Germany WWII ... and more Study notes Religion in PDF only on Docsity!

Adolf Eichmann

War criminal

WWII

Nazi Germany

WWII

Tiananmen Square

China, 1989

Extreme Obedience

Jonestown, Guyana, 1978

• Jim Jones, cult leader of The People’s Temple, persuaded his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide
• 913 died, including >200 children poisoned by their parents
• Factors
  • cult members felt alienated from American society
  • cult members were in an isolated location
  • Jones was very charismatic
  • Jones promised life “in a better place”

Waco Texas, USA, 1993

• David Koresh, cult leader of the Branch Davidians, maintained an armed standoff with the government for 51 days until he and cult members died in a fire of unknown origin
• over 80 adults and children died

Are the people who commit such acts inherently evil?

Adolf Eichmann

• supervised the deportation

of 6,000,000 Jews to Nazi

gas chambers

• Were Germans generally

evil?

• Was Eichmann an evil

sadist or merely a cog in

the wheel?

• How would you have

behaved in his situation?

Milgram’s Obedience Experiment

Stanley Milgram 1933-

Factors that affect obedience

1. Remoteness of the victim

• teacher and learner in separate rooms: 65% obedience
• teacher and learner in same room: 40% obedience
• teacher and learner in physical contact (teacher had to put learners hand on apparatus): 30% obedience

2. Closeness and legitimacy of authority figure

• “ordinary person” confederate instead of experimenter: 20% obedience

3. Cog in a Wheel

• “another subject” confederate does the dirty work and real subject assists: 93% obedience
• “another subject” confederate disobeys: 10% obedience
• subjects told they are responsible for learner’s welfare: 0% obedience

4. Personal characteristics

• no significant differences based on sex (though women reported feeling more guilty), politics, religion, occupation, education, military service, or psychological characteristics

Why Obedience? Milgram’s Views

• Large numbers of people were observed obeying a

“malevolent” authority. Why?

• Evolutionary factors : obedience has survival

value, allows for division of labour, promotes social

harmony.

• “Cybernetic” factors: organisms capable of

autonomous function must also be able to inhibit

the impulse to act against one another. Ceding

control to a coordinator allows for an effective

hierarchy.

Shifting to the Agentic State

• Antecedent Conditions to Obedience:

• family, institutional setting, rewards, perception of

authority, ideology

• Maintaining Obedient Behaviour:

• loss of responsibility, sequential nature of action,

situational obligations, anxiety

Disobedience

• While many of the participants in Milgram’s

experiments obey an authority, a number disobey.

Why?

• The experiment produced strain - participants did

not enjoy shocking an innocent person and

reported high levels of tension.

• Milgram: reducing strain promotes obedience.

When strain is too great, participant is more likely to

disobey.

The Banality of Evil

From Eichmann in Jerusalem , 1963

• [Eichmann] remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do -- to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care.
• Half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as “normal” -- ‘more normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed, while another had found that his whole psychological outlook, his attitude toward his wife and children, mother and father, brothers, sisters, and friends, was ‘not only normal but most desirable.’
• It was though in those last minutes [of Eichmann’s life] he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us -- the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt 1906-

Milgram Video: Questions

• How did Milgram make the situation seem realistic?
• What was the task for the learner and for the teacher?
• How did the learner protest?
• What sorts of things did the experimenter say to encourage

the teacher to obey? What made the experimenter seem

like an authority?

• How far did subjects go before stopping?
• Did the real subjects enjoy shocking the learner? Were they

sadists?

• Did the subjects obey just because Yale researchers had

legitimate authority?

… and a few things to think about…

• Was the study ethical? Were the results worth it?
• Why did so many people obey? What would you have done

in that situation?

Why Genocide?

• Psychology of Genocide (Ervin Staub, 1989, 2000)
  1. starting point: severely difficulty life conditions
     • harsh economic circumstances, political upheaval
     • example: Germany was struggling greatly after WWI defeat
     • counter-example: US Marshall plan after WWII
       • economic contributions to post-WWII Europe helped prevent repeat
  2. in- vs. out-group definitions become particularly strong
     • out-groups become scapegoats for society’s ills
     • example: Germans blamed Jews for their economic hardships
  3. violence begins against out-group; people believe that the out-group deserved it
     • belief in a just world, “blaming the victim”
     • example: Germans believed the Jews deserved their fate
  4. violence comes to justify itself
     • stopping would be admitting it was wrong to begin with
       • counter-example: Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
     • lack of opposition from allies strengthens resolve
       • example: lack of opposition to massacres in Yugoslavia in 1991 condoned action