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Images of inhumanity and atrocity are burned into our memories. Jewish men, women, and children being herded into gas chambers. Entire villages destroyed by rampaging gangs in Rwanda. The systematic use of rape and the destruction of communities as part of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. The massacre at My Lai in South Vietnam, the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and most recently, the carnage wrought by suicide bombers in Baghdad, Jerusalem, London, and Madrid. Reflecting on these events, we inevitably ask: What makes people so brutal? Are they mentally ill? Are they the products of dysfunctional families or cultures? Or, more disturbingly, is anyone capable of taking part in collective ruthlessness given the right–or rather, the wrong–circumstances? Now, the latest research, including possibly the largest social-psychology experiment in three decades, is providing a new window on these conundrums.

Initially, theorists sought answers to group pathology in individual psychology. In 1961, however, German-born American historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt witnessed the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. She concluded that far from the defendant demonstrating a perverted and sadistic personality (as psychiatrists for the prosecution claimed), he was utterly unremarkable and disarmingly ordinary. Arendt pronounced Eichmann to be an embodiment of the banality of evil.

Everyday Evil?

First published in 1963 in the New Yorker, Arendt’s analysis was considered shocking and heretical. But a series of studies conducted around the same time supported her observations. In experiments at U.S. summer camps during the late 1950s, Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish-born American social psychologist, learned that normal schoolboys became cruel and aggressive toward former friends once they had been placed in different groups that had to compete over scarce resources. Even more striking were obedience studies carried out at Yale University in the early 1960s by Stanley Milgram. Ordinary, well-adjusted males who took part in a bogus memory experiment were told to deliver electric shocks of increasing magnitude to another person who posed as the learner. (In actuality, the learner, an accomplice of the experimenter, received no shocks.) Amazingly, every single teacher was prepared to administer intense shocks of 300 volts, and two thirds obeyed all the experimenter’s requests, dispensing what they believed were 450 volts. Participants continued meting out punishments even after hearing the learner complain of a heart condition and yell in apparent agony. Milgram concluded: Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine.

The vivid culmination of this line of inquiry was the Stanford prison experiment, carried out in 1971 by Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo and his colleagues. The researchers randomly assigned college students to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. The goal was to explore the dynamics that developed within and between the groups over a two-week period. The study delivered these dynamics in abundance. Indeed, the guards (with Zimbardo as their superintendent) exerted force with such harshness that the study was halted after only six days.

The experimenters concluded that group members cannot resist the pressure of their assumed stations and that brutality is the natural expression of roles associated with groups who have unequal power. Accordingly, two maxims, which have had immense influence at both a scientific and a cultural level–and which are taught as received knowledge to millions of students around the world every year–are routinely drawn from the Stanford experiment. The first is that individuals lose their capacity for intellectual and moral judgment in groups; hence, groups are inherently dangerous. The second is that there is an inevitable impetus for people to act tyrannically once they are put in groups and given power.

Reexamining Group Power

The weight of the Stanford prison experiment lies in both its dramatic findings and the simple, stark conclusions that have been drawn from it. Over the years, however, social psychologists have developed doubts about the resulting received wisdom.

First, the idea that groups with power automatically become tyrannical ignores the active leadership that the experimenters provided. Zimbardo told his guards: You can create in the prisoners… a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us…. Theyll have no freedom of action, they can do nothing, say nothing that we dont permit…. Were going to take away their individuality in various ways.

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 Tyranny

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