The Banality of Evil - now under challenge

The cover article Questioning the Banality of Evil (or in PDF here)by Haslam and Reicher, published in The Psychologist is sure to cause quite a stir. It calls into question the analysis and interpretation of some of the foundational research in social psychology: Zimbardo's Prison Study, Milgram's Obedience to Authority research - and the philosophical foundation in Hannah Arendt's work on Adolf Eichmann which is the source of the term "banality of evil."

These studies are included in just about every introductory psychology or sociology text published. Students are stunned at the take-away lesson: that good people, if put into a pressured social milieu, could commit acts of unspeakable evil without questioning their actions or thinking them wrong. Many shudder in disbelief: could I really do that - shock someone to death or mistreat a prisoner? The original studies say yes; two British psychologists say, "Maybe - but it's more subtle than that."

Haslam and Reicher were the psychologists for a BBC reality-TV "experiment" designed on the model of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment; the results were quite different, with the prisoners dominating and bullying the guards. Zimbardo has been quite critical, saying that this neither qualifies as a scientific experiment nor replicates his study - and he provides a list of important differences.

Their critique in this article, though, focuses on the earlier research findings. A careful examination of all that was reported, they claim, does not support the claim that ordinary people do evil without really thinking about the evil - just the requirement to do as they are told. On the one hand, re-examination of the evidence demonstrates that a small number of people - Nazis in one study, guards or subjects in the others - seemed to embrace their roles and creatively expanded the cruel or punishing methods they used. They were aware of their actions, they merely considered them good and commendable whereas the general public thinks them vile. This is in sharp contrast with Milgram's concept of agentic state.

On the other hand - not addressed in their very short overview - studies of people who sheltered and transported Jews in Germany, whistle-blowers in giant corporations, self-sacrificing ordinary people like Paul Rusesabagina, the African hotel manager highlighted in Hotel Rwanda: people who risk all they have, even their lives, to stand up to the same normative situation which is used to explain the unthinking obedience of the others.

Peer review is the standard for evaluating the relevance and quality of academic research. It is generally contemporaneous to the collection and analysis of the data. In the best sense of the word, though, Haslem and Reicher are offering peer review where time - and the changed interpretations that are available with new social settings - allows a different perspective, with a different kind of objectivity.

We don't often talk of "peer review" with regard to 30 and 40 year old studies that are classics in the social psychology literature. The articles that Haslem and Reicher have written, though, are exactly what one hopes for in science: vigorous and open debate about the analysis and interpretation of data.

The short article in The Psychologist is geared toward a general educated audience; more scholarly versions of the concepts are presented in the (still embargoed) Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33:5 (May 2007).



Haslem, S. and Reicher, S. (2007) Beyond the Banality of Evil: Three Dynamics of an Interactionist Social Psychology of Tyranny. Personality and Social Psychology Bullein 33:5 DOI: 10.1177/0146167206298570

Haslam, S. A. and Reicher, S. D. (2008). Questioning the banality of evil. The Psychologist, 21:1, 16-19.

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin.

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority. New York: Harper & Row.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect. New York: Random House.