Milgram, Zimbardo, and Elliot: Authority and Evil in Social Psychology
This paper examines three landmark social psychology experiments — Stanley Milgram's obedience shock study, Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, and Jane Elliot's Blue Eye/Brown Eye classroom exercise — in order to explain how ordinary people become capable of cruelty and collaboration with evil. Drawing on video documentation of each experiment, the paper argues that Milgram's research explains compliance with authority once it is established, Zimbardo's research demonstrates how power differentials produce abusive behavior, and Elliot's study reveals how humans actively seek to construct hierarchies. Together, the three experiments offer a layered explanation for Nazi collaboration and other historical atrocities.
- Introduction: Understanding Ordinary Evil: Historical context motivating obedience research after WWII
- Milgram's Obedience Experiments: Subjects administer shocks under authority figure direction
- Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment: Power hierarchy causes guards to abuse prisoners
- Comparing Milgram and Zimbardo: Distinguishing compliance from power-differential abuse
- Jane Elliot's Blue Eye/Brown Eye Experiment: Arbitrary grouping rapidly produces bullying and submission
- Conclusion: A Unified Framework for Understanding Collaboration: Three experiments form a causal chain explaining atrocity
✍️ How to write this paper — guide, tools & examples ▾
What makes this paper effective
- The paper integrates three distinct experiments into a single explanatory framework, building logically from hierarchy formation to obedience to authority to the reinforcement of antisocial behavior.
- It grounds abstract psychological concepts in a concrete historical case — Nazi collaboration — giving the analysis immediate moral and historical significance.
- The paper appropriately distinguishes between what Milgram and Zimbardo each studied, avoiding the common error of treating them as interchangeable, before synthesizing their findings.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative analysis across multiple studies: it first describes each experiment individually, then explicitly contrasts their methods and objects of study, and finally synthesizes all three into a unified explanatory model. This "describe, distinguish, synthesize" structure is a reliable technique for writing about multiple sources that address related but non-identical questions.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with historical context motivating the research question (why do normal people commit atrocities?). It then covers Milgram's study, Zimbardo's study, a direct comparison of the two, and finally introduces Elliot's experiment as a third layer. The conclusion integrates all three experiments into a sequential causal chain: humans seek hierarchies (Elliot) → hierarchies create power differentials (Zimbardo) → established authority elicits compliance with harmful acts (Milgram).
Introduction: Understanding Ordinary Evil
Two of the most discussed experiments in social psychology are Stanley Milgram's shock experiments and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Both were conducted, at least partially, to help explain why seemingly normal people became Nazi collaborators during the World War II era. The experiments help demonstrate how individual authority over another person allows individuals to exercise their own proclivities for cruelty, and how being under the direction of authority figures causes people to engage in behavior that they find distasteful or cruel. This paper also examines Jane Elliot's Brown Eye/Blue Eye experiment and what it reveals about the establishment of hierarchies.
After the end of World War II, as more and more information became available — not just about the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but also about how seemingly normal individuals acted as collaborators to aid the Nazis in their pursuits — psychologists and sociologists became fascinated with how ordinary people could do things that the average person found morally repugnant. The natural response was to recoil in horror from what people had done and suggest that it was impossible for normal people to behave this way. In fact, some people initially looked for some type of biological or sociological deficiency to explain Nazi collaboration, a racist response that mirrored anti-Semitic beliefs in Nazi Germany in many ways.
However, others who had studied human behavior did not believe that Nazi collaborators had reacted in ways that fell outside the scope of normal human behavior. On the contrary, they pointed out that while Nazi Germany's conditions were horrific and the Holocaust was a large-scale atrocity, it was hardly unprecedented in human history. The Holocaust was actually only one of several mass persecutions that had targeted Jews in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Moreover, Americans who were horrified at the atrocities committed in concentration camps did not have to look abroad to see the potential negative impact of the legalized subjugation and abuse of a group of people; slavery and Jim Crow both demonstrated that even otherwise moral people were willing to act in an immoral and harmful manner if given approval to do so. The fact that such events had occurred did not explain why these evil practices arose, and two researchers — Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo — decided to conduct experiments targeting the origins of evil.
Milgram's Obedience Experiments
Milgram's experiments did not target evil per se, but were carefully tailored to investigate the impact of authority on an individual's willingness to harm other people. The study began with 40 male subjects ranging in age from 20 to 50 and asked them to inflict electric shocks on other research participants who answered questions incorrectly. No shocks were actually administered, and the "shocked" subjects were in fact knowing participants in the experiment (BigHistory NL, 2013). Each time a participant provided an incorrect answer, the subject was instructed to shock them, with the shock intensity escalating over time (Markho, 2010).
In the video documentation of the experiment, Milgram discusses people acting without any restraints on their behavior when instructed to do so by an authority figure. However, this characterization appears to be an oversimplification of how the subjects actually responded. The subjects were clearly uncomfortable with administering the shocks, demonstrated a significant amount of distress, and questioned the researcher's authority to direct the shocks. Their compliance, in other words, was not automatic or comfortable — it was achieved against visible internal resistance.
Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment
Zimbardo's prison experiment also examined authority, but from a different perspective. It investigated the role that having authority plays in one's treatment of others. Philip Zimbardo believed that establishing a hierarchy that ranked some people over others — even when everyone involved knew there was no logical or reasonable basis for that hierarchy — was sufficient to elicit negative behaviors (Mr1001Nights, 2008). To test this theory, he set up a simulated prison at his university, assigning some research subjects to play the role of prison guards and others to play the role of prisoners.
Unlike Milgram, Zimbardo did not instruct the prison guards to treat the prisoners poorly. Instead, he observed how establishing a hierarchical system of power would affect how people treated one another (Another Boring Week, 2014). The guards' behavior toward the prisoners became so extreme that Zimbardo actually stopped the experiment early, before its scheduled conclusion.
Conclusion: A Unified Framework for Understanding Collaboration
Taken together, all three experiments form a sequential causal chain that helps explain how large-scale atrocities such as the Holocaust become possible among otherwise ordinary people. Elliot's research suggests that humans are predisposed to seek out or accept hierarchical distinctions. Zimbardo's research suggests that once such hierarchies are established, people will use or attempt to use them to assert authority over others, often with abusive results. Finally, Milgram's research suggests that once authority is established, even individuals who were not originally involved in building the hierarchy will engage in antisocial behavior to reinforce it — because submitting to authority is perceived as prosocial, even in an antisocial context.
Together, these three studies offer a disturbing but coherent account of human social behavior: the drive to rank people, the willingness to abuse that ranking, and the compliance with authority that normalizes and perpetuates harm. Understanding these mechanisms is essential not only for making sense of historical atrocities, but also for recognizing the conditions that allow such atrocities to develop.
References
Another Boring Week. (2013, January 4). Feature film: The Stanford Prison Experiment. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_LKzEqlPto
BigHistory NL. (2013, March 19). Milgram experiment. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM
Ludwing Media. (2012, November 19). Brown eyes and blue eyes racism experiment (children session) — Jane Elliot. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeK759FF84s
Markho. (2010, September 25). Milgram obedience study. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W147ybOdgpE
Mr1001Nights. (2008, September 7). Zimbardo shows how most evil comes from hierarchy. Retrieved November 30, 2014, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jYx8nwjFQ
Create your account
Always verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.