In the 1950s, as the world reeled from the terrible atrocities inflicted by authoritarian regimes, social psychologists became infatuated with a new explanation for human beings’ totalitarian instincts. It was all about the situation in which a person found themselves. Social psychologists concluded that under the right – or wrong – conditions, we are all potential tyrants.
Many of us have heard about the psychologists in the United States who placed innocent participants in situations of torture, conformity or imprisonment as part of ridiculous (and recklessly unethical) experiments. At Yale University, Stanley Milgram encouraged participants to administer fake electric shocks to their innocent peers – and a majority complied. At Swarthmore College, Solomon Asch measured whether participants would conform to the majority opinion even when it conflicted with their own experience – a majority conformed at least once. At Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo split students into two groups and rendered half of them prisoners and the other half prison guards – under the instruction to dominate and control, many of the student ‘guards’ turned sadistic.
For generations, psychology textbooks have disseminated these results, perpetuating the idea that we are all prone to conformity. In pressurised situations, we would all obey – or so the story goes. And if a person can’t help but surrender to the situation, there is no need to look inside the black box of the mind, to see if some people are more prone to extreme ideologies than others.
It’s true that these experiments have since been widely critiqued – but the message they planted has proved remarkably durable. It’s present whenever commentators explain radicalisation by pointing to poverty, alienation or online echo chambers – as though anyone in those circumstances would be equally susceptible. Arguably, the message also persists when people discuss the rise of authoritarian leaders and reach for the comforting idea that whole populations simply got swept along. Take the US Capitol insurrection of January 2021 – much of the commentary emphasised the situational pressures, such as pandemic isolation, economic anxiety and social media algorithms, that supposedly turned ordinary Americans into rioters. The implication is always the same: it’s the situation, not the person.
Yet hidden within the classic social psychology studies were substantial individual differences. In Milgram’s electrocution experiments, 65 per cent of people inflicted the maximum level of pain on strangers – but 35 per cent refused. In Asch’s conformity experiments, nearly 75 per cent of participants conformed to majority opinion at some point – but around 25 per cent stood their ground. In Zimbardo’s prison study, some participants displayed signs of rebellion and at least one feigned a breakdown in order to leave early.
What is different about the sizeable minority of individuals who exhibit resistance? What happens inside the brains and bodies of those who do not obey? If we end our explanations of authoritarianism or ideological behaviour by pointing to ‘the situation’, ‘blind obedience’ and ‘uncritical conformity’, we fail to ask these questions.
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