The Nazi era shaped a generation’s scholarly obligation to study evil.

Evidence

I was born in 1938, into a cohort that was ordained to think about evil—indeed to be haunted by it, given the events of the Nazi era. But that social psychology could come to grips with what this evil might mean I did not have the vision, or perhaps the courage, to see. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3851

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ and Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies, which surround this passage and recur throughout.