An important milgram-holocaust linkage: Formal rationality

Abstract

After Stanley Milgram published his Obedience to Authority baseline experiment, some scholars drew parallels between his findings and the Holocaust-the so-called Milgram-Holocaust linkage. However, because Milgram's research has been shown to differ in many ways from the Holocaust's finer historical details, recent literature has challenged the linkage. This article argues that the Obedience studies and the Holocaust share two commonalities that are so significant that they may negate the importance others have attributed to the differences. These commonalities are (1) an end-goal of maximising "ordinary" people's participation in harm infliction and (2) a reliance on formally rational techniques of discovery to achieve this end-goal. Using archival documents, this article reveals the learning processes Milgram utilised during his pilot studies in order to maximise ordinary people's completion of the baseline experiment. This article then illustrates how certain Nazis relied on the same techniques of discovery during the invention of the Holocaust. In effect, during the Obedience studies and the Holocaust processes were developed that made, in each case, the undoable doable.