The Unconscious of History #4: The Nuremberg Trials and the Psychology of Ordinary Evil

Introduction to the Column: The Unconscious of History

History doesn't end in textbooks. It survives in the institutions we inhabit, in the ways we think about care, in the language we use to describe those who suffer. "The Unconscious of History" is born from a simple conviction: that understanding how the past has built the psychological categories we use today — of normality, deviance, therapy, exclusion — is a necessary clinical and intellectual act, not a nostalgic exercise.

Each issue features a historical moment, a movement, a reform, a figure, and brings it into the present. Not to celebrate or condemn, but to ask: what of that moment is still alive in us? What does it tell us about today's practice?

The column is addressed to anyone who works or moves in the world of psychology — researchers, clinicians, students, educators — and to anyone engaged with history or the human sciences, with the curiosity to look at their own discipline from the outside as well. The Unconscious of History is born precisely at the intersection: it is not a text of psychology applied to history, nor of the history of psychology, but a space in which the two perspectives question each other, convinced that understanding the past helps us read the present better — and that psychology, to know itself, also needs to know where it comes from.

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Introduction to Theme of This Month: The Nuremberg Trials and the Psychology of Ordinary Evil

November 1945. The world watches, exhausted, as Nazi leaders sit in the dock at Nuremberg. And the world expects to find monsters.

What it finds, instead, is something far more difficult to accept.

Two psychologists enter the cells of the military prison with notebooks and standardized tests. They measure IQ, administer the Rorschach, and listen. And the data they collect confirm none of the reassuring hypotheses everyone had hoped to find: those responsible for the extermination of millions of people are, psychiatrically speaking, within the norm.

This discovery — uncomfortable, almost unbearable — opens a question that would occupy an entire generation of researchers: if they were not monsters, who were they? And above all: what does this tell us about ourselves?

In this issue we explore precisely that question. We follow the thread that leads from the Nuremberg tests to Milgram's experiments on obedience, to Asch's studies on conformism, all the way to contemporary research on radicalization. A thread that concerns not only history — it concerns the organizations we work in, the teams we belong to, the pressures to which all of us, every day, are exposed.

Because the problem of ordinary evil is not a question of the past. It is a question of the present.

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01 — The World as It Was: When Evil Had a Recognizable Face

In November 1945, when the Nuremberg trials opened, the world was psychologically exhausted. Six years of war, millions of dead, the extermination camps just liberated: the brutality had been so total, so methodical, so organized, that the only acceptable explanation seemed to be madness. The Nazi leaders who sat in the dock had to be, necessarily, monsters. Psychologically deviant beings, morally corrupt to the core, irremediably other from normal humanity.

This narrative was not merely a comprehensible emotional reaction. It was also a necessary cognitive structure. Believing that the perpetrators were fundamentally different meant believing that the democratic system, education, culture, and civilization were a sufficient bulwark against such atrocities. It meant believing that what had happened in Germany could not happen elsewhere — not in France, not in England, not in the United States. The monster was an exception to the rule; the rule remained intact.

This view had deep roots, both in popular and in scientific culture. The psychiatry of the time was still largely influenced by a deterministic model that drew sharp lines between normality and pathology, between sanity and deviance. The criminal, the tyrant, the executioner were clinically distinguishable figures: you recognized them by their facial features, their family history, their psychopathology. Phrenology had faded, but the idea that evil was written somewhere — in the body, in the mind, in the brain — was still alive in more sophisticated forms.

On the political level, the narrative of Nazi madness also served a diplomatic and historical function: it circumscribed responsibility. If Hitler was a madman, if Göring was a pathological narcissist, if Himmler was a clinically classifiable sadist, then the problem was resolved with their defeat and death. Nazism had been an accident of history, not a latent possibility in any human society.

No one, in the autumn of 1945, was yet ready to accept the alternative hypothesis.

02 — The Fracture: When the Tests Revealed an Unbearable Normality

Kelley and Gilbert entered Nuremberg prison with instruments, notebooks, and a simple question: who are these men, psychologically? What they found shook their certainties — and would take decades to be fully absorbed by scientific and public culture.

The protagonists of the investigation

Douglas Kelley was a brilliant and ambitious military psychiatrist, trained at Columbia University. Gustave Gilbert was a social psychologist of Austrian origin, the son of Jewish immigrants, who spoke German fluently — a crucial detail, as it allowed him to converse with the defendants without intermediaries, picking up nuances and reactions that an interpreter would inevitably have filtered. The two worked together but with different approaches and temperaments: Kelley was more clinical and detached, Gilbert more interested in social psychology and moral judgment. This difference in perspective would generate, in the following years, a deep fracture in their interpretations of the data.

The tests administered

The Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale was the most advanced instrument of the era for measuring intelligence quotient. Kelley administered it to all the main defendants, obtaining results that would make headlines. The group's average IQ was considerably above the norm of the general population. Göring scored 138, the third highest; Hjalmar Schacht, the former economics minister, reached 143; Arthur Seyss-Inquart scored 141. Only Julius Streicher, the brutal editor of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, fell below average with an IQ of 106. Intelligence, therefore, was not a protective factor against participation in the extermination. It was, if anything, an amplifying factor: it made these men more effective at organizing, planning, and justifying.

The Rorschach Test — the famous inkblots developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921 — was the most controversial and debated contribution of the entire evaluation. The test is based on the assumption that the way a person interprets ambiguous stimuli reveals deep structures of personality: the type of responses, the formal quality of perceptions, the content, the level of thought organization. In Göring's case, the responses reveal a narcissistic and egocentric personality, with a strong need for control and a grandiose sense of self — traits that perfectly match the behavior observed during the trial, where Göring distinguished himself by his charisma, reactivity, and tendency to monopolize the scene. However, the use of the test at Nuremberg had serious methodological limitations: the administration procedure was not standardized, the scoring criteria were not uniform between the two examiners, and the conditions of detention made the context anything but neutral. Clinical psychologist Molly Harrower, who would devote decades to the re-evaluation of these protocols, concluded that the Nazi leaders' responses were not statistically distinguishable from those of a sample of normal adults — a finding that confirmed, by another route, the thesis of psychological normality (Harrower, 1976).

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), based on the interpretation of ambiguous images that the subject must use to construct stories, completed the diagnostic picture. The stories told by the leaders were often emotionally flat, with notably reduced elaboration of interpersonal relationships — a finding that Kelley interpreted as a sign of superficial and instrumental emotional functioning.

The uncomfortable conclusions

The results converged toward a conclusion that no one wanted to hear: the people responsible for the extermination of six million Jews and millions of other victims were, from a psychiatric standpoint, within the norm. Only Robert Ley, the head of the German Labour Front, showed signs of significant neurological impairment — and Ley committed suicide before the trial began. All the others were capable of understanding, willing, planning, and choosing.

Kelley and Gilbert, however, arrived at different interpretations of these shared data. For Kelley, the Nazi leadership embodied a specific personality structure — authoritarian, nationalist, hierarchical — that was replicable in other historical and geographical contexts. His conclusion was disturbing: men like Göring were not unique. They could emerge elsewhere. They could emerge in America. For Gilbert, on the other hand, there was something specifically German and ideologically constructed in the character of the leaders — a cultural and political deformation rather than a psychological one. This divergence would mark a personal and intellectual conflict between the two that was never resolved.

03 — The Psychological Lens: Six Responses to an Enormous Question

The question that Nuremberg had opened — why do ordinary people commit atrocious acts? — would occupy a generation of psychologists. The answers that emerged in the following two decades form one of the densest and most coherent constellations in the history of social psychology. Each study illuminates a different angle of the same problem.

The authoritarian personality — Adorno and colleagues (1950)

In the years immediately following the war, Theodor W. Adorno — a German philosopher of Jewish origin, exiled in the United States after the racial laws — led a group of researchers in an ambitious project: to empirically identify the psychological roots of fascism. The result was The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950), an imposing work of nearly a thousand pages that sought to answer a precise question: does a type of personality structurally predisposed to totalitarian thinking exist?

The answer was yes — and to measure it the group developed the F-Scale (fascism scale), a psychometric instrument that measured nine dimensions of the authoritarian personality: conventionalism (rigid adherence to the norms of one's group), authoritarian submission (uncritical deference to authority), authoritarian aggression (tendency to punish those who violate norms), anti-intraception (rejection of subjective thought and introspection), superstition and stereotypy, the power-toughness complex, destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and concern with sex.

The profile that emerged was that of an individual who had defensively internalized a rigid need for order, hierarchy, and certainty — often as a response to a childhood characterized by severe and conditional parental authority. The hostility that could not be expressed toward parents was displaced onto external groups: minorities, foreigners, constructed enemies. The authoritarian personality was not a pathological anomaly: it was a psychologically comprehensible response to certain developmental conditions — which meant it could form in any cultural context.

The Authoritarian Personality has remained one of the most influential and most debated texts of twentieth-century psychology. Methodological criticisms are not lacking — the F-Scale presents problems of acquiescence (all items are worded in the same direction), and the link between scale scores and real behavior is more complex than suggested by the authors. Yet its conceptual contribution is indisputable: it opened the path to decades of research on the psychology of prejudice, authoritarianism, and cognitive rigidity.

Conformism as perceptual revision — Asch (1951)

Solomon Asch was a Polish Gestalt psychologist and sociologist who had emigrated to the United States. Like Adorno, he had been deeply marked by observing how millions of Germans had adhered to Nazism without apparent resistance — and he wanted to understand the psychological mechanism underlying that adherence.

His 1951 experiment was elegant in its simplicity. A subject was asked to match the length of a sample line to one of three comparison lines. The correct answer was obvious, leaving no room for interpretation. But in the room were other participants — in reality the experiment's confederates — who all gave the wrong answer.

The results were surprising: 75% of subjects conformed to the group's wrong answer at least once; about 32% of total responses under conditions of social pressure were incorrect. Only 25% of subjects never conformed.

But the subtler discovery was another. In post-experiment interviews, some subjects reported actually having perceived the line differently from the others, not simply having chosen to respond as the group had. Group pressure did not merely produce public compliance — it produced, in some cases, a genuine revision of perception. Asch called this phenomenon perceptual distortion: visible reality was reinterpreted to make it consistent with social consensus.

This mechanism is particularly relevant for understanding Nazism: it was not only a matter of people who knew things were wrong but stayed silent out of fear. It was, in many cases, a matter of people who had genuinely stopped seeing what was obvious — because all the social, ideological, and institutional context around them denied it.

Destructive obedience — Milgram (1961–1963)

Stanley Milgram was twenty-six years old when he designed what would become the most famous and most controversial experiment in the history of psychology. It was 1961, and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem dominated the news. Eichmann — the SS functionary who had organized the logistics of mass deportations — defended himself by presenting himself as a mere executor of orders. He had no hatred for Jews, he said. He had only done his duty. Milgram wanted to know if this justification was psychologically plausible — and to what extent.

His experimental design was simple and ingenious. A subject was recruited as a "teacher" in a study on memory and learning. The "learner" — in reality an experimental confederate — was strapped to a chair in an adjacent room. Each time the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher had to administer an electric shock of increasing intensity, from 15 to 450 volts, on a control panel clearly labeled with indications ranging from "Slight Shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock" all the way to the ominous "XXX." The shocks were not real, but the subjects did not know that. The learner acted out reactions of increasing pain: at 150 volts he asked to stop, at 300 volts he stopped responding.

When the subject hesitated or wanted to stop, an experimenter in a white coat encouraged him to continue with standardized phrases: "Please continue." "The experiment requires that you continue." "You have no other choice, you must continue."

The result: 65% of subjects went all the way to the maximum shock of 450 volts. All subjects continued at least to 300 volts. This in laboratory conditions, with a stranger, without any direct threat to their own safety, without any supporting ideology (Milgram, 1963).

Milgram repeated the experiment in dozens of variants, systematically modifying the conditions to understand what increased or decreased obedience. Physical proximity to the victim decreased obedience: when the subject had to hold the victim's hand on the shock panel, the rate dropped dramatically. Proximity to authority increased obedience: when the experimenter was in the room, rates were higher than when he gave instructions by telephone. The presence of other "disobedient teachers" — in reality confederates who refused to continue — significantly reduced the actual subject's obedience.

Milgram developed the concept of the agentic state to explain these results (Milgram, 1974): in the presence of a legitimate authority, people perceive themselves as agents of another's will, not as autonomous authors of their own actions. Moral responsibility is perceived as transferred upward in the hierarchy. This is not weakness or cowardice: it is a deeply rooted psychological mechanism, probably adaptive in many social contexts, which becomes catastrophic when authority pursues destructive ends.

Milgram's experiment has received considerable methodological and ethical criticism over time — especially regarding the lack of informed consent and the possibility of psychological trauma in participants. Some subsequent studies have raised doubts about the generalizability of the results. Yet its conceptual force remains intact: the problem of obedience is not a problem of exceptionally evil people, but of ordinary psychological mechanisms in extraordinary contexts.

The birth of the regime in miniature — The Third Wave, Jones (1967)

No one had planned Ron Jones's experiment. In 1967, Jones taught contemporary history at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. During a lesson on Nazism, a student posed a question Jones did not know how to answer: how was it possible that the German people had claimed not to know anything about the atrocities? How could one not know?

Jones decided to answer with a direct experience. On Monday, he introduced the concept of discipline: correct posture, short and precise answers, coordinated movements. The students reacted with surprising enthusiasm. On Tuesday he added the concept of community: the movement was called "The Third Wave," had a motto — "Strength through discipline, strength through community" — and an exclusive salute. On Wednesday he introduced the concept of action: members of the movement had the task of convincing others to join and of reporting those who did not follow the rules. By that day, thirteen students from other classes had already asked to participate.

On Thursday, Jones distributed membership cards — some with a red cross on the back, a symbol of a special assignment. The students did not know that the red crosses had no meaning. The surveillance and informing behavior intensified. On Friday, Jones summoned everyone to the auditorium, announcing the imminent revelation of the national leader of the movement, of which The Third Wave was only a local vanguard. At 12:05, the screen remained blank for two minutes — two minutes of collective waiting in silence — and then Jones spoke and explained: there was no leader. There was no movement. What they had experienced in five days was the answer to their question: that is how it was possible that the Germans did not know (Jones, 1976).

The Third Wave remains one of the most powerful — and most disturbing — examples of how group dynamics, authority structure, and collective identity can form in a very short time, without explicit coercion, in young, educated people living in a democracy.

Deindividuation and the power of role — Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo (1971)

Philip Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram had known each other from childhood: they had grown up in the same neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. It is therefore unsurprising that Zimbardo's experiment was conceived, at least in part, as an extension and deepening of Milgram's work. If Milgram had demonstrated that people obey the orders of an authority, Zimbardo wanted to understand something different: what happens when people take on a role that legitimizes power over others?

In August 1971, Zimbardo selected twenty-four male university students, psychologically healthy, and randomly divided them into two groups: twelve "guards" and twelve "prisoners." The guards received uniforms, mirrored glasses to prevent eye contact, and batons. The prisoners were assigned identification numbers in place of their names, clothing resembling nightgowns, chains on their ankles. The prison had been set up in the basement of Stanford's Department of Psychology.

The experiment was supposed to last two weeks. It was stopped after six days.

Within a few hours, the guards had begun treating the prisoners in increasingly degrading ways: forced nocturnal wake-ups, physical humiliations, arbitrary punishments. The prisoners rapidly showed signs of acute stress: crying, anger, disorganization, in one case a crisis that Zimbardo interpreted as a nervous breakdown. Zimbardo himself, who had taken on the role of prison superintendent, was slow to realize how badly the situation had deteriorated — it was his then-girlfriend, psychologist Christina Maslach, who convinced him to stop the experiment when she visited on the fifth day (Zimbardo, 2007).

The key concept that Zimbardo developed from this experience was that of deindividuation: the process by which immersion in a role, combined with the anonymity of the uniform and the institutional structure, progressively erodes the sense of individual identity and personal responsibility. The person stops acting as themselves and begins acting as the role they occupy — with the rights, the implicit permissions, and the impunity that the role brings with it.

It is important to note that the Stanford experiment has received severe methodological criticism in recent years. Journalist Thibault Le Texier, in 2019, documented how Zimbardo had instructed the guards to behave harshly, and how his dual role as researcher and superintendent had strongly oriented the dynamics of the experiment (Le Texier, 2019). This does not nullify the conceptual contribution — but it invites us to read the results with the rigor that good psychology always requires.

Cognitive conformism in propaganda — Tajfel's research on social identity (1979)

Henri Tajfel was a Polish psychologist of Jewish origin who had spent the war in French prisoner-of-war camps, surviving by hiding his identity. After the war, he dedicated himself to understanding how membership in a group could transform into hatred toward other groups — and he did so with an almost brutal experimental simplicity.

In his experiments on the minimal group paradigm, Tajfel divided participants into groups arbitrarily — sometimes based on their pictorial preferences (Klee vs. Kandinsky), sometimes by a coin toss. No contact between the groups, no shared interest, no common history. Yet even in these minimalist conditions, participants showed consistent favoritism toward their own group in the distribution of resources, and tended to maximize the relative advantage of their group over the other — even at the expense of their own absolute gain.

The social identity theory that Tajfel developed together with John Turner (1979) holds that individuals derive part of their self-esteem from group membership — and that this dynamic naturally leads to favoring one's own group and devaluing external groups. No history of conflict, cultural difference, or ideology is necessary: the distinction alone is enough. Antisemitism, racism, nationalism — from Tajfel's perspective — are not aberrations, but extreme amplifications of a universal psychological mechanism.

04 — The Legacy: What Has Changed — and What Still Persists

The banality of evil as a conceptual category

Hannah Arendt followed the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 as a correspondent for The New Yorker, and what she saw shocked her. She did not find a monster. She found a middle-aged bureaucrat, lacking charisma, incapable of independent thought, obsessed with procedures and his own career. Eichmann had no ideological hatred for Jews — or at least, that was not the main engine of his actions. He was simply someone who, as he himself said, had never had a thought of his own.

Arendt coined the expression "the banality of evil" to describe this figure (Arendt, 1963): evil that does not spring from hatred or madness, but from superficiality, from the inability or refusal to think. Eichmann had not ceased to be human in the biological sense. He had ceased to be human in the moral sense: he had delegated conscience to the hierarchy, had substituted judgment with procedure.

This conceptual category has been one of the most debated of the twentieth century. Some historians of the Holocaust — in particular Daniel Goldhagen in Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) — have contested Arendt's thesis, arguing that the perpetrators were driven by genuine and deep antisemitism, not mere obedience. The debate is not resolved, and probably never will be completely: mass evil is too complex to be reduced to a single explanation. But the tension between the two positions — evil as ideology and evil as abdication of thought — remains one of the most fertile interrogatives that psychology and history share.

The birth of modern forensic psychodiagnostics

Before Nuremberg, psychiatry had a marginal presence in courts — it served essentially to determine capacity to understand and to will, not to trace personality profiles or to understand the psychological mechanisms of crime. The 1945–46 trials changed this: for the first time, instruments such as the Rorschach, the Wechsler-Bellevue, and the TAT were systematically employed in the context of an international criminal trial. The methodological limitations were serious, but the gesture was revolutionary: psychology entered the courtroom not as a curiosity but as an applied discipline.

In the following decades, forensic psychodiagnostics developed enormously: the administration and scoring standards of tests were progressively formalized; specific protocols emerged for evaluating dangerousness, malingering, and criminal responsibility; the figure of the forensic psychologist became a recognized interlocutor of the legal system. All of this had a root, however imperfect, in those cells at Nuremberg.

The reform of international criminal law

The legal principles that emerged from the Nuremberg trials — formalized by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1950 and known as the Nuremberg Principles — established three fundamental precedents. First: there exist crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity that international law punishes independently of the domestic law of states. Second: official position — being heads of state, ministers, military officers — does not exempt from criminal responsibility. Third: the execution of a government or superior order does not constitute a defense, although it may be considered a mitigating circumstance (International Law Commission, 1950).

This last principle is particularly relevant in dialogue with Milgram's experiments: international law implicitly acknowledges that obedience to orders is a powerful psychological response — otherwise the mitigating circumstance would make no sense — but affirms that individual responsibility cannot be completely delegated. The tension between the force of psychological mechanisms and the permanence of moral responsibility is at the heart of both.

Moral disengagement — Bandura (1999)

Albert Bandura, drawing from a different tradition — social learning theory — developed in the 1990s a framework for understanding how people capable of prosocial behavior can justify to themselves and others profoundly harmful actions: moral disengagement (Bandura, 1999).

The mechanisms Bandura identified are multiple and recognizable: moral justification (the violent action is presented as necessary for a higher good — the homeland, the race, purity); euphemistic labeling (killings become "cleansing operations," victims become "enemy elements"); advantageous comparison (one's own actions are relativized by comparing them with even worse atrocities); displacement of responsibility (as in Milgram, blame is transferred toward those in command); diffusion of responsibility (in a collective system, no one feels fully responsible); dehumanization of the victim (stripping the victim of their humanity makes it easier to harm them); and attribution of blame to the victim (the victims deserve what they receive).

These mechanisms do not operate only in genocides. They operate in organizations, in institutions, in professional teams. They operate whenever a system produces systematic harm and its members manage not to feel responsible.

The predictive power of context — contemporary research on radicalization

The tradition inaugurated by post-Nuremberg studies has profoundly influenced contemporary research on radicalization and terrorism. McCauley and Moskalenko (2017) proposed a "pyramid" model of radicalization that distinguishes three levels — opinions, emotions, actions — and identifies the transition mechanisms between each. The crucial point is that radicalization is not a phenomenon that concerns only psychologically deviant individuals: it has identifiable structures and dynamics that operate on ordinary people under certain conditions of deprivation, perceived humiliation, membership in cohesive groups, and the presence of strong identity narratives.

This does not mean justifying or relativizing. It means understanding — and understanding is the precondition for prevention.

05 — The Open Question: The Knot That No Study Has Untied

All the studies we have examined converge toward an answer that many find unbearable: organized evil is not an anomaly. It is the amplification of ordinary psychological mechanisms — obedience, conformism, group identity, deindividuation, moral disengagement — in extraordinary conditions. It does not require monsters. It requires contexts, roles, authority, and people who stop thinking.

This answer generates a question that has not yet found a satisfactory solution: if the mechanisms are universal, why don't all people obey? In Milgram's experiments, 35% of subjects refused to reach the maximum shock. In Asch's experiments, 25% never conformed. In real history, there were those who hid Jews, who disobeyed orders, who testified against their own companions. What set them apart?

Research suggests some directions. The presence of a model of dissent — even just one — significantly reduces compliance in Milgram's experiments. A strong and stable sense of personal identity seems to correlate with resistance to group pressure. The capacity for critical thinking and familiarity with moral complexity seem to be protective factors. But these answers are still partial.

For those who work in clinical, educational, or institutional settings, the question has concrete and immediate implications. The mechanisms studied by Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo, and Bandura do not operate only in totalitarian regimes: they operate in healthcare organizations, in schools, in professional offices, in therapeutic teams. The pressure to conform to the "climate" of a group, the tendency to follow the supervisor even when something doesn't add up, the gradual slipping toward practices that individually seem reasonable but together produce harm: these are dynamics recognizable in many contexts of care and work.

The question that Nuremberg opened — eighty years ago, in the cells of a German military prison — is still the most urgent: what institutional structures, what reflective practices, what organizational cultures make it more difficult to slide toward harm? How does one design a context that does not rely on individual goodness — which is variable, fragile, always subject to pressure — but that structurally supports responsibility, dissent, and critical thinking?

This is not a historical question. It is a question of the present.

06 — For Further Reading: Reliable Historical and Scientific Texts

• Primary sources and historical texts

  • Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.

  • Gilbert, G. M. (1947). Nuremberg diary. Farrar, Straus.

  • Kelley, D. M. (1947). 22 cells in Nuremberg: A psychiatrist examines the Nazi criminals. Greenberg.

• Classic psychological studies

  • Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Row.

  • Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In H. Guetzkow (Ed.), Groups, leadership, and men (pp. 177–190). Carnegie Press.

  • Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.

  • Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper & Row.

  • Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

  • Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. Random House.

• Theoretical and applied developments

  • Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.

  • Goldhagen, D. J. (1996). Hitler's willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Knopf.

  • Harrower, M. (1976). Rorschach records of the Nazi war criminals: An experimental study after thirty years. Journal of Personality Assessment, 40(4), 341–351.

  • Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 823–839.

  • McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2017). Friction: How radicalization happens to them and us. Oxford University Press

• For a narrative deepening

  • Conti, N. (2012). I pazzi di Hitler: La storia dimenticata degli psichiatri di Norimberga. Bollati Boringhieri. (For an accessible introduction in Italian to the context of the Nuremberg psychological experiments.

  • Browning, C. R. (1992). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins. (A rigorous historical analysis of how ordinary men became mass perpetrators — the perfect historical complement to the psychological studies.)

"Every generation believes itself to be immune. It is precisely this belief that makes it vulnerable."

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Conclusion

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