Abstract
In Milgram’s (1963, 1965a, 1965b, 1974/2004) experiments on destructive obedience, an authority figure repeatedly ordered a resistant participant to deliver what seemed to be increasingly painful shocks to a confederate victim who demanded to be released. A three-stage behavioral model (aversive conditioning of contextual stimuli, emergence of a decision point, and a choice between immediate and delayed reinforcers) proposes that participants withdraw to escape personal distress rather than to help the victim. The model explains significant details in accounts of the 1942 massacres of some 3,200 Jewish civilians at Jozefow and Lomazy, Poland, by Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101. The use of historical analyses to test nomothetic psychological theories offers unique opportunities for advancing understanding of destructive obedience.
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