[db48x]

No, mostly it just reminds us that ordinary people are mostly evil. At best they’re purely self–interested. There’s no dissent there.

There’s a good book called “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher Browning which explores this. The Reserve Police Battalions were created by Germany to police captured territory, but they were seen by ordinary Germans as a way to avoid the war and conscription. The members were not Nazis, and almost to a man they joined because it was an honorable way to avoid participating in the evils happening all around them. They were only trained for ordinary honest police work, but in the end many of them were being used to hunt down and murder Jews. They were sent out into forests to comb them for underground shelters. They rounded up Jews and herded them into mass graves.

Almost none of them complained or tried to avoid participating. No one punished them if they didn’t participate. No one coerced them into participating. A few asked for and received transfers, if I recall correctly. The best that can be said about the rest is that many of them are believed not to have actually fired their weapons. Some of them probably went the whole war without actually killing anyone, technically. They were just assigned the job so they did it.

[antonvs]

You’re cherry-picking, generalizing without any basis, and apparently projecting.

[db48x]

If you say so then it must be true.

[antonvs]

The first paragraph of your previous comment states some conclusions that you've assumed.

Your second paragraph gives a single example which is apparently supposed to support that conclusion. That's a definitional example of cherry-picking and hasty generalization.

The projection comes in because it's difficult to see how you would reach those conclusions from the available evidence, unless you're projecting.

[db48x]

No, I didn’t quote all available evidence in an internet comment. I’d never finish, if I did that. Instead I picked one salient but infrequently encountered body of evidence. I recommend reading the book.

And if you want more evidence than that, then I suggest reading about Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments. A little quote:

    Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become
    patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions
    incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
    few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

I think that if you want yet more evidence then you can probably acquire it yourself. Personally I must sleep.

[danaris]

Anyone who takes the Milgram Experiments or the Stanford Prison Experiment seriously needs their head examining.

[db48x]

I disagree. There has been some criticism of his experiments, but don’t forget that the experiments were successfully replicated many times, by different researchers and in different countries. Don’t forget either that Milgram was surprised by the results; his advance prediction was that Americans would comply with authority far less often and that he would have to repeat the test with Germans to see a high level of compliance. Instead there was essentially no variation between the nationalities that were tested. If he had been deliberately faking the data then that would not have happened. He also repeated the experiment a number of times with varying circumstances. His best results were that he could get both more compliance out of his test subjects as well as less compliance by controlling how closely related the test subjects were to the supposed victims. People who already knew the supposed victim were much less likely to comply than strangers. This suggests that he was measuring a real effect.

Some of the criticisms are valid, and the results to not reflect well on us as people. The 33% of people who can keep to their stated ethics in the face of authority probably have a really hard time believing that 66% of people cannot. To them it seems easy and obvious that you just don’t violate your ethics. But imagine it this way: for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in tiny tribes wandering in the wilderness. Failure to heed the orders of the tribe’s leaders would have been a virtual death sentence for most of that time. That environment literally breeds for people who obey even when they think it’s a bad idea. That’s apparently not long enough for the trait to have become universal, thankfully.

I don’t know about the TPSE though. I didn’t cite it either.

[antonvs]

That "quote all available evidence" line is disingenuous. A substantial argument doesn't require that, but you didn't make any argument.

If you're unaware of all the criticism of Milgram's experiments, then you have some studying to do before we can have a meaningful discussion about this.

While you're catching up on the history of social psychology since 1961, you might want to ask yourself why it is that you're so eager to believe that "ordinary people are mostly evil". Do you have a religious background, perhaps? "Original sin" and all that?