Here comes an update of the Lucifer post as there are new books on the market. Some want to understand (like Arendt or Amery) while others (like Nietzsche and Sartre) would strongly oppose. I am somewhere betweenboth parties with an increasing tendency to explain human (and corporate) behavior by social group pressure while there is still room by inborn personal differences. The 2007 Carnaghan and McFarland studies are giving further support to this view – there was a selection bias in the Zimbardo et als studies. On the other hand – crisis situations always call for strong leaders who need much less arguments to convince others than under normal circumstances that “others are evil” to justity their won distorted moral. It’s not the “Banality of the Evil“, it’s the “Complexity of the Evil” that makes it so contagious.
Reading list ([original list])
T. Abel. Why Hitler came to power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986
H. Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin, New York 1963
Phil Banyard. Tyranny and the tyrant. The Psychologist, 20 (8), 2007, 494–495
C. Browning. Ganz normale Männer. Das Reserve-Polizeibataillon 101 und die „Endlösung“ in Polen. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999
T. Carnahan, S. McFarland. Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 2007, 603–614
D. Cesarani. Eichmann. His life and crimes. Heinemann, London 2004
C. B. Christensen. The women from Lublin: The guards of Majdenek. BBC Books, London 2005
A. Haslam, S. Reicher. Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 2006, 1–40
Wolfgang Sofsky. The order of terror. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1993