German Guilt Diffusion Milgram’s Experiments Doubted Perry

Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments, by Gina Perry. 2012

Sophisticated Deconstruction of Milgram’s “Anyone Can Become a Nazi Killer” Experiments. Implications For German Guilt Diffusion

Some critics of this book have implied the author is unqualified. Whether in agreement with her or not, the objective reader will quickly realize that she is. The bibliography alone makes it is obvious that Gina Perry has carefully studied the subject, and has done so at great depth and from many angles. Furthermore, she has interviewed leading analysts of Milgram’s experiments, such as Don Mixon (pp. 60-on), psychologist Diana Baumrind (pp. 232-on), psychiatrists Martin Orne and Charles Holland (pp. 138-139), and Milgram’s research assistant Taketo Morata (pp. 140-on). What’s more, the author has done original research: She has studied the archives that contain Milgram’s data. (p. 140).

Nor is it correct that author Gina Perry ignores the fact that Milgram’s experiments have been replicated in other nations. She actually lists them! (p. 336).

AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES—AND NOT ONLY POLISH UNIVERSITIES—ONCE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST JEWS

Author Perry reminds us that, “Since the mid-1920s, Yale and Harvard, both located in areas with large numbers of Jewish immigrants, had limited the intake of Jewish students by imposing a 10 percent quota. This was relaxed in late 1961…” (p. 99).

THE IRRELEVANCE OF MILGRAM’S EXPERIMENTS FOR UNDERSTANDING GERMAN CONDUCT

Gina Perry reminds us that Milgram’s experiments “have acquired the status of a modern fable, warning of the perils of obedience to authority” and that “scientists, too, are storytellers.” (p. 11).
Many of Milgram’s subjects stated that they never fully believed that the experiment they were involved in was real. Milgram tried to explain this away by saying that they were just engaging in after-the-fact rationalizations for their unexpected and onerous conduct during the experiments. However, even in this, Milgram was self-serving: He believed the results of his questionnaire when it suited his purposes (p. 141) and disbelieved it when it didn’t. Even so, Milgram’s position is instructive. He is tacitly admitting that the motives of the shock-administrators (and not just their obedience) are material facts.

Milgram’s apologetic is refuted by clear facts. Milgram’s research-assistant Taketo Murata found a clear relationship between the shock-administrator’s belief in the reality of the painful shocks, and his disinclination to obey the order-giver’s commands to deliver ever-more-powerful shocks to the “victim”. (p. 140). Gina Perry concludes that, “…its’ not that inside of all of us there’s an Eichmann waiting for the right situation—a commanding authority figure whose destructive orders we will follow blindly. Instead, Taketo’s analysis suggests the opposite: that the majority of Milgram’s subjects resisted orders when they truly believed they might be hurting someone.” (p. 141).

Further refutation of Milgram’s apologetic comes from an analysis of the tapes of the experiments, as conducted by researcher Andre Modigliana. He observed that both the compliant and non-compliant shock-administrators were showing obvious discomfort in “inflicting pain” upon the subjects. (p. 297).

Note that this is the EXACT OPPOSITE conduct of that of the Nazi German torturers and killers. (pp. 232-233). Let us examine the original. Psychologist Dianna Baumrind (1964. Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST 19(6)421-423) commented, “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…It is obvious from Milgram’s own descriptions that most of his subjects were concerned about their victims…” (Baumrind, p. 423).

MILGRAM’S LABORATORY AND NAZI GERMAN OPERATIONS—TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

For Nazi German genocidal policies (not only against Jews!) to succeed, what was needed was not one-time obedience but sustained obedience. Common sense dictates that it is much easier for the torturing of the victim to continue if the torturer believes that the victim deserves contempt (as in Nazism) than it does when the torturer believes that the victim deserves compassion (as in Milgram’s experiments).

The central issue is even more basic. How can a simplistic set of one-time experiments, lasting a day or so (p. 297), be in any way comparable to the repeatedly-premeditated, and repeatedly-performed and sustained murderous behavior of the Germans during WWII? Furthermore, if it is THAT easy to get “ordinary” people to torture and kill others just because some authority tells them to do so, then why have Nazi-style genocides not been much, much more common in history?

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DILUTION OF GERMAN GUILT FOR THE HOLOCAUST

Stanley Milgram, who was Jewish (p. 24), stated in unpublished documents that his Jewish background shaped his research. (p. 110). He wanted to find out what made the Nazis “tick”. But what he would have us believe is that a Nazi “ticks” in all of us.

The fact that the conventionally-interpreted results of Milgram’s experiments reduce the culpability of the Germans is obvious. Author Gina Perry quips, “Milgram argued that he had captured both an explanation for the Holocaust and a universal truth about human nature in his lab. All of us, according to him, could have driven the trains, marched the prisoners, or staffed the death camps. It wasn’t the case that Nazism sprang from the German character or that Germans had a monopoly on blind obedience—the Holocaust could just as easily have happened in the United States or in fact in any Western country.” (pp. 10-11). Revealing!

I now move beyond the immediate contents of this book in order to put it in broader context:
Although Milgram’s influence, on Holocaust studies, has waned (p. 296), one must still consider how it fits-in with the long-term pattern of relativizing German conduct. The diffusion of guilt away from the Germans includes such tactics as the de-Germanization of the Nazis in Holocaust films, the frequent media mendacious remarks about “Polish death camps”, and the increasingly German-less Holocaust in eastern Europe (e. g, the big media splash about the Jedwabne “revelation”.)

So let us refocus the question about Nazi German conduct. Murderous German action, against various European peoples (not only Jews) was the direct outgrowth of centuries of German supremacist thinking. It is no more complicated than that. See, for example, THUS SPAKE GERMANY, by Coole.