Milgram’s obedience paradigm may itself have begun converting subjects into ‘doubled’ evil-doers.

Evidence

Not surprisingly, Milgram did not come to these conclusions. Were Milgram to have accepted Lifton’s construction, that it was the obedience to the initial commands of authority that began the conversion-to-evil process, he would have found himself wearing a very uncomfortable shoe indeed. It would mean Milgram had begun the process of converting his innocent subjects to “doubled” individuals, capable, if they went further down that path, of independently acting to inflict harm on other individuals in the name of science, as did the Nazi doctors in the name of the state. To use Milgram’s vocabulary, he took himself as showing that the agentic state already existed in his subjects, and his experimenter could rather easily “flip on” that state. But an uncomfortable alternate reading is possible: that Milgram had set up a terrible machine, and had begun to create (to again use the Lifton vocabulary) this doubled state in those unlucky individuals who were fed into the machine. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3959

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The reflexive charge — that the obedience experimenter, not just obedient subjects, is implicated in the conversion-to-evil process — turns the ethical critique back on social psychology’s own founding paradigm.
• XREF: Connects to Lifton’s concept of the ‘doubled self’ among Nazi doctors, and to the broader ethics-of-experimentation literature (IRB reforms post-Milgram).