Milgram’s own experiment may have begun converting subjects to evil

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

These are the family of processes that seem to me to be involved in creating individuals who willingly do evil. That they often occur together, and that many of them are frequently caused by the same circumstances, is undeniable. It is the fact that many of these processes are involved in the conversion process, and that the individual is in some unstable and dynamic state—now relying on one justification, now on another—that seems to me to become obscured when an altered state is postulated. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Milgram’s obedience paradigm may itself have begun converting subjects into ‘doubled’ evil-doers. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3959; Analyzing and explaining evil may itself contribute to banalizing it; People who do evil use shifting justifications rather than entering a fixed altered state — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940

Broader Connections

• Milgram’s obedience paradigm may itself have begun converting subjects into ‘doubled’ evil-doers. #corroborates (1.00) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3959
• People who do evil use shifting justifications rather than entering a fixed altered state #complicates (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940