In the decades following the Nazi Holocaust of World War II,
endeavored to understand the psychology behind mass acceptance of and
in large-scale moral atrocities. In 1967, Burt Ross' controversial "Wave"
into group identification and blind obedience using high school students
to offer insight into Nazi Germany. In 1972, Stanley Milgram designed a
(filmed) experiments at Yale University, which dramatically illustrated the
susceptibility of otherwise "normal" individuals to perpetrate brutality
was ever conducted on the post-war German population, for whom the
was initially intended (Luban, p.97).
Almost simultaneously, in 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted another
(filmed) experiments at Stanford University that were originally designed
investigate the effects of captivity. Unexpectedly, they revealed dramatic
relating to the intoxicating power of authority and the acceptance of
behavioral realities that had to be terminated very prematurely for the
and emotional well being of some of the subjects. Indeed, Zimbardo was so
concerned about potential long term psychological trauma from the study
maintained regular, periodic consultations with the participants for
afterwards. Zimbardo's famous experiment involved the creation of a
using undergraduates assigned randomly to be prisoners and prison guards.
Under subsequent analysis, the revelations of all these pioneering
the roles played by agency, authority, obedience, corruption of judgment,
cognitive dissonance theory in human behavior suggest that as many as two-
the human population is capable of accepting and participating in horrific
conduct under the right circumstances and external influences. The
also consistent with the findings of Hannah Arendt (Luban, p.104) who
the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann prior to his execution in
Israel. In the everyday practice of law, these principles regularly
in...