Milgram’s obedience studies show situations can override personal character.

Evidence

SITUATIONS VERSUS PERSONALITY Stanley Milgram’s (1974) famous experiments on obedience provide a clear and highly relevant example. Men recruited through newspaper ads were maneuvered into being the Teacher in a supposed experiment on the effects of electric shock upon learning. Although the “Learner” (a Milgram confederate) never received any shocks, the situation was masterfully convincing. The Teachers had every reason to believe they were inflicting terrible pain on the Learner soon after the experiment began. By the end of the session, if the subjects did not stop it, they could easily have believed the next shock would kill the unconscious Learner, if he was not already dead. The point of the experiment was to see when subjects would defy their local authority, the Experimenter, and shock no more. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on situational power over personality, e.g. Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment and the general situationism debate in social psychology. — connects to: Milgram’s obedience theory locates harsh action in situational authority pressure, not internal hatred. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 602