Evil actions usually stem from ordinary people caught in social forces, not evil individuals

Evidence

These, I want to assert, are examples of the major message arising from the books. Its validity is strengthened by the independent convergence of these books on this conclusion. The books examine a variety of evil acts. Lifton, using a close lens, examines the involvement of doctors in the Nazi death camps. Staub, using a longer lens, examines many episodes of genocide, mass killing, and torture. Milgram, as is well known, examined the behavior of individuals in a “psychological experiment” in which they were ordered to give what seemed to be painful and harmful electric shocks to others, thus giving us what may be regarded as the closest possible experimental analogue to evil. Kelman and Hamilton tell us a good deal, indeed sometimes as much as we can bear to read, about the circumstances leading U.S. Army units to the massacre of Vietnamese women and children at My Lai. As we will see, the proposition that arises from all these books is that many evil actions are not the volitional products of individual evildoers. Instead, they are in some sense societal products, in which a complex series of social forces interact to cause individuals to commit multiple acts of stunning evil. In that process, the individuals committing the evil are themselves changed. They become evil although they still do not show the demonic properties suggested by our conventional views of evil. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3899

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Milgram’s obedience experiments and the banality-of-evil lineage (Arendt), and to the learned example library on how ordinary circumstances produce atrocity. — connects to: Ordinary people become destructive agents through duty, not hostility — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 606
• SEED: An angle for ‘the conformity of evil’: how four independent research programs converging on the same chilling conclusion - that evil is manufactured socially, not born individually - strengthens the claim beyond any single study.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3899