Working towards the experimenter: Reconceptualizing obedience within the Milgram paradigm as identification-based followership

The behavior of participants within Milgram's obedience paradigm is commonly understood to arise from the propensity to cede responsibility to those in authority and hence to obey them. This parallels a belief that brutality in general arises from passive conformity to roles. However, recent historical and social psychological research suggests that agents of tyranny actively identify with their leaders and are motivated to display creative followership in working toward goals that they believe those leaders wish to see fulfilled. Such analysis provides the basis for reinterpreting the behavior of Milgram's participants. It is supported by a range of material, including evidence that the willingness of participants to administer 450-volt shocks within the Milgram paradigm changes dramatically, but predictably, as a function of experimental variations that condition participants' identification with either the experimenter and the scientific community that he represents or the learner and the general community that he represents. This reinterpretation also encourages us to see Milgram's studies not as demonstrations of conformity or obedience, but as explorations of the power of social identity-based leadership to induce active and committed followership

Inside ‘State Terrorism’: Bureaucracies and Social Attitudes in Response to Enforced Disappearance of Persons in Argentina

This article examines different social attitudes that members of state bureaucracies established with regard to the system of disappearances under the last military dictatorship (1976-1983) in Argentina. Although there have been significant contributions on the role of the state under the dictatorship in terms of transitional justice approaches, only recently have a number of works shown the grey areas of state officials and the cleavages and nuances that cut across the various levels of state bureaucracy. In this framework, applying a sociological analysis, this article examines a number of administrative records produced during the dictatorship by workers of a morgue and of a public hospital, located in the provinces of Có rdoba and Buenos Aires. In these records, the workers documented the existence of practices involved in the different stages of the system of disappearances. The article has four parts. The first section provides an overview of the political and historical context of 1970s Argentina. The second section presents a brief review of the literature on the role of the state under the dictatorship. The third section focuses on a letter by a group of morgue workers from the province of Có rdoba addressed to dictator General Jorge Videla demanding proper work gear and a rise in pay in consideration of the hazardous nature of the tasks they were ordered to perform in connection with enforced disappearances. The fourth section examines entries made in the incident books of the nursing service of the Posadas Hospital, located in Haedo, a town in the province of Buenos Aires, which provide evidence that some of the hospital workers were forcibly disappeared. The article concludes with a reflection for both academics and practitioners, suggesting the need to rethink state bureaucracies by questioning how they are represented as monolithic machines and re-examining the relationships between civil society and the state and the responsibilities under regimes that commit human rights abuses.Fil: Crenzel, Emilio Ariel. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

The persistence of collective guilt

This paper asks why, despite the obvious difficulties entailed, the notion of ‘collective guilt’ continues to feature in discussions of the responsibilities of one group towards another. The aim is to clarify how it is that the partial success of repeated attempts to distinguish individual from collective guilt and to confine the latter to a pre-modern moment reveals something of our present. The key contributions to this discussion made by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers in relation to Nazi Germany are examined for their ambivalences in this regard, as are some recent developments in international law and politics. The suspicion is that collective guilt is a notion that modern political reason cannot embrace and yet which it cannot entirely disavow: ‘collective guilt’ and the element of fate that it implies is central to our understanding of citizenship, nationhood and political commitment. The paper thus attempts an analysis of the durability of the concept of collective guilt; it is not an evaluation of its usefulness, but an exploration of its persistence