Stanley Milgram Experiment Analysis

We like to think that “evil” is something that people—and monsters—are, or aren’t. But this is mistaken. Only actions, not persons, can be good or evil.

Most people­—ones we’d want to call “good”—will commit horrific acts when put under sufficient emotional pressure. Do you know about Stanley Milgram’s torture experiment? He showed that two thirds of ordinary Americans would torture other ordinary Americans to death—ones they believed to be entirely innocent. The torture and deaths were faked, but the experimental subjects believed that they had killed another person, simply because Milgram told them they had to. This is horrifying and almost unbelievable; but the experiment has been replicated several times (in other countries too), and appears

So we need to be much less confident about the answer.

It is easy to act ethically in good conditions. When we feel threatened or confused, humans can become unboundedly destructive.

Pretending this is not true makes the problem worse. It is only when we acknowledge that maybe we would have tortured an innocent person to death, in Milgram’s experiment, that we can start the transformational work to make that less likely.

The most dangerous monsters are those who believe they are moral people. Because they believe monstrosity is alien (somewhere else, those bad people), “moral people” are capable of rationalizing horrifying acts of cruelty, which must be OK because “we are not monsters.”

Monsters who know they are monsters are harder to threaten or confuse. No werewolf would have cooperated with Milgram; they would simply have eaten him.

Inhuman, unnatural, unintelligible,

Except when what we feel, and do, and experience makes no sense, when measured against concepts of humanness. Except when we look in a mirror…

Freud, in his essay “The Uncanny,” tells a story. He was alone in a railway car sleeping compartment, preparing for bed. He looked up and was horrified to see a most unpleasant, nasty-looking old man coming out of his bathroom. It took him a moment to realize that its mirrored door was swinging open as the train rocked, and the monster he saw was himself—reflected.

Uncanniness is the experience of conceptual interpretation breaking down. Spookiness is frightening unpredictability and alienness—mixed with familiarity. Nothing can be more familiar than ourselves; and yet there are times when we find ourselves alien, chaotic, and confusing.

Monsters are driven mainly by emotion, not reason. Many recent experimental studies show the same is true of “humans.” We all pretend to be much more rational than we really are; our “reasons” are mostly just after-the-fact rationalizations of emotional decisions. We all treat each other as much more human than we really are; we demand unreasonable reasonableness from