Positivist research traditions made the study of evil academically difficult.

Evidence

Reflecting on these books, I have been led back to Stanley Milgram’s (1974) book detailing his obedience studies and his final interpretations of them, and to Hannah Arendt’s (1963) seminal and controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem: Report on the Banality of Evil. Each author has been willing to consider the events or people we label as evil. (Milgram does so somewhat implicitly, the others quite explicitly.) Each author deserves considerable credit for this; evil is not a topic easily accessible within the confines of those psychological movements that are the inheritors of our earlier operationalist, positivist traditions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3852

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’ and Kelman & Hamilton’s ‘My Lai’ research, both foundational texts in this area.