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Personality and Social Psychology Review

DOI: 10.1207/s15327957pspr0303_71999; 3; 246Pers Soc Psychol Rev

Leonard BerkowitzEvil Is More Than Banal: Situationism and the Concept of Evil

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Personality and Social Psychology Review1999, Vol. 3, No. 3, 246-253 Copyright C 1999 byLawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Evil Is More Than Banal: Situationism and the Concept of EvilLeonard BerkowitzDepartment ofPsychology

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Socialpsychology as a discipline has given relatively little attention to theproblem ofevil in society, and those discussions in thisfield that do exist typically regard evil ac -tions as only varieties ofaggression without any characteristics that distinguish themfrom other forms of intentional mistreatment of others. Because of the field'ssituationistic perspective emphasizing the individual's susceptibility to the power ofthe immediate situation, social psychologists generally view the fairly high levels ofobedience to authority displayed in Milgram 's (1963, 1974) classic experiment as theparadigmatic example of evil behavior. For them, much evil is, in Arendt's (1963)well-known phrase, only "banal, " and Milgram 'sfindings are often viewed as illus-trating the "central dynamic " involved in the slaughter ofmillions ofJews and other"undesirables " in the Holocaust. This article holds that Milgram 's (1974) obedienceresearch does not represent significant features of th e Holocaust, especially the sa-dism that occurred not infrequently, and disregards the vital difference between thosewho initiated the murderous policy an d the others whofollowed their orders. Buildingon Darley 's (1992) earlier conjectures about thefeatures that ordinarypeople mightconsider injudging whether any given action is evil, I suggest that manypersons havea prototypic conception of evil and speculate about the dimensions that could be in-volved in this prototype.

The deliberate slaughter of millions of people inthis century solely because of their group member-ship has prompted considerable discussion of th e na -ture and causes of evil. Discussants have come froma variety of scholarly fields, including philosophy,history, political science, sociology, and psychology.However valuable their contributions, none has th ecomplete answer to th e question of why th e killingsarose. Furthermore, virtually al l of them have givenlittle attention to th e problem of just what constitutesevil. Although there is a clear need for a comprehen-sive and detailed review of th e various perspectiveson evil, this article is relatively narrowly focused. Icite some analyses advanced by writers withnonpsychological backgrounds; nevertheless, I con-centrate on social psychological conceptions. Morethan this, the article is concerned primarily with how

In preparing this article, I benefitted from discussions with severalcolleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, especially (butnot only) Professors Alfred Kadushin, Marcus Singer, and ClaudiaCard, and also members ofmy Monday lunch group. However, theyshould not be faulted for whatever shortcomings the reader mightfind in my article.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Leonard Berkowitz,Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,5818 Anchorage Avenue, Madison, WI 53705. E-mail:lberkowi~facstaff.wisc.edu.

social psychologists think of evil rather than withtheir understanding of it s manifold causes.

Just What Is Evil?: Ambiguity of theConceptRemarkably few discussions of evil, in social psy-

chology or in the other areas of human study, offer aspecific definition of this term. Evil is usually seen asth e intentional, planned, and morally unjustified in-jury of others. However, there is no such consensusas to whether the word should be applied only to es -pecially egregious wrongdoing and/or to acts that dovery great harm (e.g., Darley, 1992, and Levine,1997). Everyday language is frequently even less pre-cise. At times, when ordinary people employ thisconcept, it seems to have certain highly significantfeatures, discussed subsequently. However, as Alford(1997) noted, very often th e word evil also has "con-notations that ar e not exhausted by terms like 'bad,''aggressive,' 'destructive,' and so forth" (p . 1). Docu-menting this observation, when Alford asked a heter-ogeneous sample of U.S. adults about theirconception of evil, he found that the term di d not al-ways have a moralistic meaning. Many of his infor-

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CONCEPT OF EVILmants linked the word to a terrifying experience ofimpending doom. Anthropological investigationshave revealed even greater variation in the meaningof evil across (and within) human societies. Accord-ing to Parkin's (1985) review of the anthropologicalliterature, "talk about evil ... ranges over the terribleand serious as well as the playful and creative" (p . 1)and can refer to imperfection and incompleteness orgreat "ambivalent power" over others as well as vio-lations of moral codes. Philosophical analyses do no tnecessarily guide us out of this linguistic ambiguity.Perhaps surprisingly, we cannot find much direct dis-cussion of the concept of evil in the literature ofphilosophical ethics; when philosophers in this fieldtake up the idea of evil, they typically are concernedchiefly with the question of how evil can occur if theCreator is omnipotent and perfectly good (C. F. Card,personal communication, September 1998).However diffuse and wide-ranging a re t he notionsof evil in the various human societies, a comprehen-sive analysis of evil requires adopting what might becalled a modified essentialist position and specifyingcertain features that differentiate between matters thatar e evil and those that are merely very bad or verywrong. Such a distinction would be, at the very least,a step toward increased precision in discussions ofmorality and ethics. The words bad and wrong areused al l to o broadly and do no t necessarily conveythe sense of moral repugnance that we usually havein mind when we speak of evil. Achieving this morespecific conception requires the identification ofthose qualities that evil behaviors possess to a greateror lesser extent-the conceptual dimensions, wemight say, along which actions vary. Unfortunately,the most important social psychological discussionsof evil, with one possible exception, provide us withlittle guidance as to what these characteristics (or di-mensions) might be.Social psychologists typically have a relatively re-stricted conception of evil that focuses on sociallyunjustified violence, bu t in my view, that conceptionis no t sufficiently specific. In the two most recent andbest-known social psychological works on this topic,the meaning given is very general and broad-ranging,even somewhat fuzzy. Staub's (1989) analysis ofgenocide, titled The Roots of Evil: The origins ofgenocide and other group violence, thought of evil as"the destruction of human beings" involving not onlyth e deliberate killing of others bu t also "the creationof conditions that materially or psychologically de -stroy or diminish people's dignity, happiness, and ca-pacity to fulfill basic material needs" (p . 25).Baumeister (1997), seeking a general understandingof "human violence and cruelty" in his book Evil: In-side human violence and cruelty, had an even morediffuse conception. He regarded evil as "intentional

interpersonal harm" (p. 8) and used the word to en -compass no t only "great crimes and horrendous acts"bu t also "petty cruelties and minor transgressions ofeveryday life" (p . 8) . For Baumeister, restricting theterm to excessive, horrendous acts is to succumb tothe "myth of pure evil" (p . 18), a stereotyped concep-tion of evil as essentially different from less extremeunjustified aggression. Another view, espoused byDarley (1992), was somewhat more mixed in nature.On one hand, Darley spelled out what he believed ar ethe major aspects of ordinary persons' conceptions ofevil. His discussion, a step toward identifying th e de -fining characteristics of the concept, is intriguing, andI build on it in a later section of this article. However,Darley also dismissed the importance of these fairlyspecific features: "Our everyday understandings ofevil ... ar e frequently incorrect or perhaps, more ac -curately, irrelevant to most acts of evil and thereforedeeply misleading" (p . 199). He concluded that it isnot "possible to definitely, unequivocally categorizecertain acts as evil, and others as merely 'bad"' (p .201). In my view, the "everyday understandings" thatDarley listed are no t "irrelevant" for a truly adequateanalysis of evil.The Situationist Perspective on Evil

Social psychologists, by and large, do not think ofevil actions as the product of evil personalities. Em-phasizing the immediate situation's great influence onthoughts, feelings, and behavior, they tend to minimizethe role of individual dispositions (see, e.g., Ross &Nisbett, 1991). Baumeister (1997) and Darley (1992)explicitly held this situationist perspective and faultedthe common explanation of evil as "springing from th edepraved minds of evil persons" (Darley, 1992, p.202). As Darley pu t it, offering an analysis undoubt-edly shared by most of his disciplinary colleagues,"when one probes behind evil actions, one normallyfinds no t an evil individual viciously forwarding dia-bolical schemes bu t instead ordinary individuals whohave done acts of evil because they were caught up incomplex social forces" (p . 204)

The Obedience ExperimentsSocial psychologists typically point to a number ofinvestigations as graphic illustrations of how ordi-narily well-behaved people can be led by situationalinfluences to torment others, most notably in

Zimbardo's (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe,1973) prison simulation and Milgram's (1963, 1974)series of experiments on obedience to authority.Milgram's ambitious research program is especially




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BERKOWITZpertinent to my argument, and I concentrate on thisresearch.As is well known, in Milgram's (1963) basic proce-dure, each of the male volunteer participants were re-cruited from the surrounding community bynewspaper ad s and other solicitations so that the sam-ple was commendably heterogeneous, varying greatlyin age and socioeconomic background. When th e par-ticipant arrived at the university laboratory, he was in-formed that his job was to teach certain pairs of wordsto another person in the next room. Supposedly, be-cause he was taking part in a study of the effects ofpunishment on learning, he also was told to punish theother person in the session, th e learner, with an electricshock whenever th e learner made a mistake and to in-crease the shock's intensity with each error. The scien-tist-experimenter said th e shocks could be very painfulbu t would not cause any permanent tissue damage. Ifthe naive participant seemed reluctant to deliver a pun-ishment at any time after the learning trials go t underway, the watching experimenter prodded him to followthe rules and administer the shock. Sixty-five percentof th e participants obeyed fully, going up the punish-ment intensity scale with each "mistake" to the suppos-edly highly painful maximum level of 450 V.I Bycontrast, in another experiment, when a peer (termedby Milgram [1974] a "common man") gave the ordersto the participants, only 20% complied fully and deliv-ered the highest intensity shocks. Here, then, is the cen-tral finding: The majority of the ordinary peopleserving in the baseline study apparently believed theywere so obligated to comply with the commands of alegitimate authority that they were even willing to hurtanother person severely at the authority's behest. Otherinvestigators have replicated these basic results, some-times in a close duplication of Milgram's (1963) pro-cedure, bu t at other times, using variations in thesetting, the actions called for, and the nature of t he a u-thority, and in other nations as well as in the UnitedStates (see Blass, 1992; A. G. Miller, 1986).Some Questions About the Experiments

This is no t the place to discuss al l of the intricaciesin th e controversy that has swirled around Milgram'sIWith this startling degree of obedience as the baseline, Milgram(1974) then carried out 17 other studies to explore the situational con-ditions that could lessen the extent of compliance to the authority'sorders. Other writers have at times exaggerated the amount of com-pliance to the experimenter's orders. Baumeister (1997), as one ex-ample, told his readers that t he v as t majority [italics added] of

Milgram's participants had shocked th e learner up to the maximumlevel of intensity (p . 191). As A. G. Miller's (1986) survey of theMilgram series shows, by no means were the vast majority ofth e par-ticipants as completely submissive as Baumeister indicated.

(1974) research (for thoughtful reviews and discus-sions of the arguments, se e Blass, 1992; A. G. Miller,1986). Instead, I take up only two questions: whetherthe immediate situation was so powerful that personal-ity characteristics had only a very insignificant roleand ho w well the experiment represented the key fea-tures of the Nazi death camps. This discussion thenserves as the basis of my proposed conception of evilactions.The Role of Individual Differences

As indicated previously, most reports of the obedi-ence experiments in social psychology have playeddown the importance of individual differences in theresults. They generally agree with Milgram's (1974)contention that "the disposition a person brings to theexperiment is probably less important a cause of hisbehavior than most readers assume" (p . 205). Never-theless, it is t he c as e that a substantial fraction of theparticipants in Milgram's experiments and the otherreplications (although a minority) defied the authorityat some point and refused to deliver the highest inten-sity punishment. Did they possess particular person-ality traits that led (or enabled) them to resist thesituational pressures? Elms and Milgram (as cited inA. G. Miller, 1986) sought to answer this question byinterviewing a subsample of the participants who hadtaken part in the first four Milgram experiments. Al -though these investigators found that the fully obedi-en t persons tended to score higher on a measure ofauthoritarianism and lower on a social responsibilityscale than di d th e "defiants," they were more im-pressed by th e variability in personality scores fromone individual to another. Explicitly taking thesituationist stance held by most of their disciplinarycolleagues, they concluded that their results "do notreveal a single personality pattern which is inevitablyexpressed in one behavior or the other" (as cited in A.G. Miller, 1986, p. 239).Blass (1991) gave somewhat more weight to thepart played by personality traits, although he ac -knowledged that the evidence is not as unequivocalas one would want. In his survey of the researchseeking to distinguish between those who obeyedfully and those who defied the authority at somepoint, he noted some interesting suggestive differ-ences, particularly in regard to the participants' be -liefs as to how their lives were controlled: Severalstudies found that the people who refused to complycompletely with a high-status authority's orders weremore apt to view themselves, rather than external cir-cumstances, as largely responsible for the significantevents in their lives (i.e., in th e latter case, theyscored high on an internal control scale). Even more




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CONCEPT OF EVILsuggestive are the results of other, "real-life" investi-gations that inquired into the personal qualities ofnon-Jews who protected or rescued Jews from theNazis. The largest such study compared 406 rescuerswith 126 other non-Jews who had lived through theNazi occupation, bu t who had no t helped Jews escapefrom the Nazis (Oliner & Oliner, 1988, as cited inBlass, 1993, pp. 40-41). Apparently in accord withsome of the findings cited in Blass's (1992) survey ofth e experimental research, the researchers reportedthat the rescuers scored significantly higher on mea-sures of social responsibility inclinations and internalcontrol than di d the nonrescuers (Blass, 1993, p. 41).However generalizable these particular observationsare, the fact that there were these rescuers indicatesquite clearly that some people were able to resist verysubstantial situational pressures.

Of course, as Blass (1991, 1993) and others haveemphasized, it is no t the "defiant" people's personali-ties alone but their traits in interaction with the situa-tion confronting them that probably led to theirresistance to authority. Blass (1991) revealed to usthat relatively few studies have investigated these in-teractions (p. 406), in part because Milgram-type lab-oratory experiments have no t been conducted in theUnited States since the late 1970s (although they con-tinue to be carried ou t in other countries; Blass, 1991,p. 408). However, research provides some indica-tions. For example, I noted previously that a strongsense of internal control appears to promote resis-tance to seemingly arbitrary orders primarily whenthe commanding authority ha s a high status (Miller,1975, as cited in Blass, 1991, p. 404). The desire tobe a "master of one's own fate" evidently has to beactivated if it is to produce defiance of commands. Inthis case, the greater the experimenter's status, themore the participant presumably perceived a chal-lenge to his personal freedom, thus producing a stron-ge r desire to control his own behavior and greaterresistance to the influence (Blass, 1991, p. 404).Limitations to th e Generalizability ofthe Findings

Besides emphasizing the power of th e immediatesituation, many social psychologists believe Mil-gram's (1974) results help us understand the Holo-caust-or at least th e behavior of ordinary Germansinvolved in th e extermination process. Milgram di dno t attempt to establish a miniature version of a deathcamp in his laboratory, but he di d believe his proce-dure captured a central aspect of the Holocaust. Inboth the laboratory and in the concentration camp, aperson was ordered by a legitimate authority to actagainst other people (Milgram, 1974, p. 177; A. G.

Miller, 1986, p. 181). Indeed, Milgram and others(e.g., Darley, 1992; Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; se ealso A. G. Miller, 1986) also have generalized thefindings to other "crimes of obedience" (to use the ti-tl e of the Kelman and Hamilton, 1989, book), such asthe actions of the American soldiers at My Lai inVietnam. Writers other than professional psycholo-gists also have expressed this strong situationist view.Psychiatrists such as Dicks (1972) and Lifton (1986),both of whom interviewed Nazis directly involved inthe Holocaust, emphasized the extent to which thekillers were relatively "normal" rather than patholog-ical and had carried ou t their actions in obedience tohigher authorities. Dicks explicitly believed theMilgram (1974) research helped explain the behaviorof the SS men he had studied.Probably the best known statement of the thesisthat ordinary people had engaged in the horrific kill-ings is Arendt's (1963) report of the trial of AdolphEichmann in Jerusalem. Although Eichmann had amajor part in organizing the planned extermination ofthe European Jews, Arendt portrayed Eichmann as anuninspired bureaucrat who had only carried out hisinstructions. In he r famous phrase, Eichmann illus-trated the "banality of evil".2 For Milgram (1974),and for many of the social psychological discussantsof his research (see A. G. Miller, 1986), Arendt'scharacterization applied to his obedient participants:

After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submitto the authority in our own experiments, I must con-clude that Arendt's conception of the banality ofevilcomes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.The ordinary person who shocked his victim di d so outof a sense of obligation-and not from any peculiarlyaggressive tendencies. (Milgram, 1974, p. 6)At this point, I voice my misgivings. I wonder ifthose who stress the generalizability of Milgram's(1974) experiments to the Holocaust and talk aboutthe banality of evil have not unduly neglected the sa -

dism in some of the killings. Blass (1993) noted that,after the publication of he r banality of evil report,

2Arendt (1963) went so far as to hold that Eichmann was so muchthe bureaucrat that, she believed, he did not fully realize whathe wasdoing. Although Arendt's analysis of both Eichmann and evil ha sbeen severely criticized, it also ha s me t with considerable approval(see S. Miller, 1998). Contrary to Arendt's thesis, it certainly can beargued that Eichmann's behavior wa s far frbm "banal." He played animportant part in the infamous 1942 Wannsee conference at whichthe final solution was planned. As he later testified, the discussionsthat took place were "in very blunt terms ... of killing, elimination,and annihilation" (as cited in Bullock, 1993, p. 757). He was not apassive, low-level clerk in th e killing process. In this regard, Blass( 1993) quoted an observer who pointed out that "the bureaucracy thatdestroyed the European Jews" (p . 37), and it s middle-level Nazi offi-cials (such as Eichmann), often produced major recommendationsand set policies as to ho w the extermination program should operate.




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BERKOWITZArendt herself was struck by the sadistic nature ofsome of those who participated in the murder of theJews. In Arendt's introduction to Naumann's 1966book about the trial of 22 SS men in Frankfurt, sh ecommented about the charges that the defendants hadcommitted horrific acts of torture and murder:

No one had issued orders that infants should be throwninto the air as shooting targets, or hurled into the firealive, or have their heads smashed against walls.... In-numerable individual crimes, one more horrible thanthe next, surrounded and created the atmosphere ofthegigantic crime of extermination. (Arendt, a s c it ed inBlass, 1993, p. 36 )

The evil acts to which Arendt referred were no t ba -nal, and the shocks the participants delivered in theMilgram (1974) experiments were no t commensuratewith the behaviors sh e described. This is no t to sa ythat the Milgram research does no t reflect some as-pects of the Holocaust. The compliance the partici-pants exhibited might have some conceptualresemblance to the actions of a good number of peo-ple in the killing process such as many of th e Ger-man soldiers in th e Einsatzgruppen (special "strikesquads") or the concentration camps, the Nazi doc-tors interviewed by Lifton (1986), or even those Jewswho became ghetto police charged with rounding upother Jews for deportation-but it does no t fully rep-resent al l of the terrible crimes that were committedin the Holocaust.Reflecting on these egregious actions, and also onthe fact that officials such as Eichmann often had avery active part in the extermination program, Blass(1993) questioned whether Milgram's (1974) researchadequately represents th e Holocaust:

Both the laboratory evidence and the historical detailsof the destruction of European Jewry raise doubtsabout the fit between Milgram's conceptual model ofobedience to authority and the actualities of the Holo-caust. Clearly, there was more to the genocidal Naziprogram than th e dispassionate obedience of the aver-age citizen wh o participated in th e murder ofhis fellowcitizens ... ou t ofa sense ofduty and not malice. (p . 37 )

As I see it (and Blass, 1993, shares this view), socialpsychology's general belief in the overriding powerof the immediate situation has contributed greatly tothe widespread contention that Milgram's observa-tions capture the "central dynamic" of the Holocaust.

Toward the Establishment of a MoreSpecific ConceptSocial psychology's relative inattention to th egreat atrocities committed during the extermination

program reflects the field's failure to establish a con-ception of evil that differentiates among categories ofwrongdoing. In so doing, there is a danger oftrivializing terrible actions. In not distinguishing con-ceptually between truly egregious injustices, such asth e Nazis' Final Solution (the campaign to extermi-nate the Jews), and somewhat lesser misdeeds-suchas, say, a husband hitting his wife in a rare outburstof temper-as Darley (1992) and Baumeister (1997)implicitly did, we basically place al l of these behav-iors in the same psychological category and thus runthe risk of regarding al l of them as equally bad.In this connection, the absence of a special con-ception of evil somehow also seems to have resultedin a failure to recognize degrees of evil. Social psy-chology manifests this particular failure in it s concen-tration on th e relatively low- or intermediate-statuspersons who complied with their superiors' policiesrather than on the higher-ups who initiated these poli-cies. The evil of Adolph Eichmann's actions surelydi d no t match those of Adolph Hitler or even those ofReinhardt Heydrich, described by Arendt (1963) as"the real engineer of t he F in al Solution" (p . 36).Possible Features of a CommonPrototype of Evil

It is helpful to employ Hitler as our reference inspecifying the qualities distinguishing evil from otherinstances of wrongdoing. It is true that quite a few his-torians ar e reluctant to call Hitler evil, apparently be -cause they prefer to interpret historical events andpersonages in terms of fairly abstract cultural, eco-nomic, historical, and social influences, and believe acharacterization of Hitler as evil is a relic of th e disap-proved Great Man theory of history (Rosenbaum,1998). Yet, other scholars ar e willing to apply the termto him. When the English historian Alan Bullocktalked to journalist Ron Rosenbaum about Hitler, Bull-ock asked, rhetorically, "If he isn't evil, who is?"(Rosenbaum, 1998, p. xxi). Indeed, for many scholarsand lay people alike, Hitler is the embodiment of evil.Nevertheless, I am not concerned here with th e ques-tion ofjust why it is appropriate to so regard him (seeRosenbaum, 1998, for discussions of this issue). I amno t attempting to sa y what is evil, objectively speak-ing. My interest is somewhat different, more psycho-logical. I offer some speculation as to why so manypersons do believe that Hitler and other high Nazi offi-cials were evil. What aspects do outside observers,rather than the perpetrators, consider when they judgewhether some action is evil, and if so, how evil theythink it is.

Psychological research into the categorization pro-cess is relevant here because I am saying that evil is a250

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CONCEPT OF EVILcategory within the broader class of social norm vio-lations. Like other categories, this concept is fuzzy (t ouse the psychologists' term), in that it does no t pos-sess necessary and sufficient features. If we extrapo-late from studies of the categorization process (seeFiske & Taylor, 1991), it could be that, when peoplesay something is evil, a variety of associated ideascome to mind. For some, these may be the ideas iden-tified in anthropological and other naturalistic inves-tigations (e.g., Alford, 1997; Parkin, 1985), such as"ambivalent power" or "impending doom." Equallyimportant, there is a good chance they also will thinkof some instances of what they had previously re-garded as evil. These will range from events closestto , or most typical of , their general notion (or proto-type) of evil to those that have only a slight similarityto this conception. My guess is that, for many people,t he a ct io ns and policies we usually associate withHitler have a close resemblance to their prototype ofevil. We should keep in mind, though, that wrongfulevents vary in how close they are to this prototype:Some acts ar e more evil than others. Thus, we mightconsider th e brutal killing of a young child to be evilbecause our conception of this event resembles ourprototype of evil b ut n ot think of a husband's beatinghis wife as very evil because our understanding ofthis battering is far removed from the prototype.

The remainder of this article spells ou t what Ithink are th e elements of a very widely shared proto-type of evil, building on Darley's (1992) conjecturesbut, for our purposes, organized around the actionsand policies of the Nazi leaders, especially Hitler.These characteristics should no t be seen in absolute,yes-or-no terms but as continua varying in degree.My listing of these matters also demonstrates how in-adequately th e obedience experiments represent trulyhorrendous instances of evil.To start, for most persons in technologically ad-vanced societies, an evil action obviously is behaviorthey regard as morally wrong, a clear intentional vio-lation of their moral norms. It is quite possible thatthey base their judgment on their assessment of botht he a ct io n and it s assumed goal. Think of the com-mon reaction to a battered wife's killing of her seri-ously abusive husband. A good part of the publicapparently considers th e wife's inferred mo-tive-self-defense, they might believe as well asthe impropriety of the killing itself.(I digress here for a side observation. Although I amconcerned with the factors influencing an onlooker'sjudgments rather than with th e appraisals made by th evictims or th e actors, it is interesting that the highestNazi authorities themselves apparently believed theirprogram to exterminate th e Jews and other "undesir-able" minorities violated traditional moral standards.One indication of this is Himmler's admonition to SS

officials in 1943 no t to speak openly ofth e Nazis' driveto kill the Jews. He even required the members of th eSS teams "selected for 'special duties' ... to swear per-sonally an oath of silence" [Bullock, 1993, p. 803]. TheNazi leadership believed it was necessary to "cleanse"the world of Jews, but they also realized that the delib-erate slaughter was contrary to their people's beliefsand would horrify or at least shock them.)

The evil act is, of course, a sharp, even (to useDarley's, 1992, phrase) egregiously excessive, depar-ture from the onlookers' norms. One of these quali-ties leading observers to judge that some occurrencegreatly violates their moral standards ha s to do withthe victims' helplessness. We think baby killers ar edepraved in part because the children are unable toprotect themselves from their attackers. The to p Na-zis had no compunction about destroying children aswell as adults. In a 1943 talk to party leaders,Himmler told them he would no tbe justified in getting rid of the men-in having thempu t to death-only to allow their children to grow up.We have to make up our minds, hard though it may be,that this race must be wiped off the face of the earth.(Bullock, 1993, p. 805)

In addition, of course, the adult victims were also gen-erally helpless in the face of the Nazi's brutal force.Another factor influencing people's judgments ofevil has to do with the perceived responsibility for theaction. This particular consideration has been surpris-ingly neglected by those who talk ofthe banality ofevilas if it di d no t at al l matterwho initiated, or was primar-ily responsible for, the behavior being assessed. We

can easily se e the relevance of this perceived responsi-bility in Milgram's (1974) research. His analysis of th esituation confronting th e participants in his experi-ments holds that the fully obedient individuals di d notfeel guilty about what they had done because theythought of themselves as only the scientist-authority'sagent, who had little responsibility for the harsh pun-ishment they delivered.3 In the Eichmann case, I sug-gested previously that Eichmann had voluntarilyshaped more of the extermination program than is usu-ally supposed by those wh o regard him as only one ofmany "faceless bureaucrats" in the Nazi administra-tion. Still, naive onlookers presumably would not viewhim as highly evil if they believed he had little actualresponsibility for the mass killings. Extending this rea-soning, would those onlookers not also think that Hit-ler, in initiating the Holocaust, was much more

3Although Milgram (1974) provided only mixed evidence for thissupposition, Blass ( 1996) found that naive onlookers who watched afilmed depiction ofan obedient participant were likely to believe thatthe obedient participant would shift responsibility for his actions tothe experimenter.




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BERKOWITZresponsible than Eichmann? Does anyone doubt thatHitler would be judged as more evil than Eichmann?

Yet another quality affecting everyday judgmentsof evil involves the imbalance between the amount ofinjury done to the victims and the magnitude of therelatively immediate and fairly objective gainsachieved by the wrongdoer. Baumeister (1997) re-ferred to this discrepancy as the "magnitude gap,"whereas Darley (1992) observed that for the ordinaryperson "an evil action occurs when an individual in-flicts a highly negative state on another, without thisnegative state being balanced in any way in the per-petrator" (p . 201). Both, however, give this importantmatter only slight attention. I suggest that t he g re atmajority of Americans thought much more about therelation between victim suffering and actor gainwhen they asked themselves whether Truman's 1945decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan was evil. Intheir minds, the devastation visited on Hiroshima andNagasaki was well balanced by the lives of the hun-dreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and marines wh ootherwise would have been killed or wounded in theplanned invasion of Japan.One might ask how this consideration applies toHitler and the Nazis. Some, taking the perpetrators'perspective, might argue that Hitler's exterminationprogram was dreadfully wrong bu t no t truly evil: Hehad devised this policy "in the deluded bu t sincere be -lief that he was taking heroic measures to save the hu-man race from the deadly plague he believed the Jewsto be" (Rosenbaum, 1998, p. xxii). They would say,then, that from Hitler's point of view, the gain to beachieved was great indeed, and therefore, the Nazi dic-tator's policy should no t be judged as evil (seeRosenbaum, 1998, p. xxii).Two points can be made in reply. One has to do withthe aim's impropriety. Most outsiders probably wouldregard this particular goal accomplishment as im-moral, and as such, whatever success the Nazis had inreaching their objective would actually enhance theonlookers' condemnation of the extermination pro-gram as evil. Setting this aside, there is also a questionof the perceived magnitude of the gain. Although wereally cannot say what external judges would estimateto be the amount of benefit that Hitler would haveachieved in his own mind if he had reached his objec-tive, my guess is that, in considering this subjectivegain, onlookers would give the greatest weight to gainsthat are both relatively concrete rather than abstractand that are obtained relatively soon rather than in theindefinite future. Most outside observers undoubtedlywould scorn Hitler's desire for racial purity as well hisbelief that Jews were racial contaminants. However, inaddition, if I am right, they are also likely to think thatthe gain (the pleasure Hitler would feel at reaching hisgoal regarding the Jews) was both to o vague and to o

distant to count for much in their estimation of th e suf-fering-gain discrepancy.Conclusions

My discussion in this article has concentrated onHitler and the other Nazi leaders and their attempts todestroy the European Jews. This focus certainly doesno t mean that I believe the Nazis' killing of Gypsies,homosexuals, and seriously handicapped persons wasnecessarily less evil than the Holocaust, or that Stalinor Po l Pot (or any others one might nominate) wereno t evil. I chose to deal only with the Final Solutionbecause it seemed to me that I could most clearlyhighlight the issues I believe to be important by con-fining my discussion to this particular matter.

Then, too, it is obvious that there is little good evi-dence to support my characterization of the suppos-edly common prototype of evil. Research clearly isrequired to determine just what are the dimensionsthat people consider when they judge whether a so -cially wrong behavior is evil and along which dimen-sions highly and less evil actions vary. I amespecially intrigued by the notion of th e magnitudegap. Do people, indeed, consider the discrepancy be -tween the magnitude of the damage done by th e per-petrators and th e amount of fairly concrete benefitsthey receive from their action? If so, in thinkingabout the actors' benefits, do they give much lessweight to the pleasure the perpetrators would feel, es-pecially in the future, than to any concrete gains theymight obtain fairly soon? It is also important, ofcourse, to investigate what kinds of individuals pos-sess this conjectured prototype (or any other specificconception of evil) and how it might change with so -cialization. Society long ha s aspired to have a crimi-nal code whose prescribed punishments "fit thecrime," morally speaking. People seem to be rela-tively satisfied with those punishments given to crim-inals that they believe are commensurate with thejudged evil of the criminal actions. We conceivablymight be better at predicting this public reaction if weknew how most people in our culture define evil andwhat are the qualities that enter into their judgmentsof degrees of evil.

ReferencesAlford, C. F. (1997). The political psychology of evil. Political Psy-chology, 18, 1-17.Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality

of evil. New York: Viking.Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Evil: Inside human violence and cruelty.New York: Freeman.Blass, T. (1991). Understanding behavior in the Milgram obedienceexperiment: The role of personality, situations, and their inter-




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CONCEPT OF EVILactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60,398-413.Blass, T. (1992). The social psychology of Stanley Milgram. In M. P.Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol.25, pp. 277-329). New York: Academic.

Blass, T. (1993). Psychological perspectives on the perpetrators ofth e Holocaust: The role of situational pressures, personal dispo-sitions, and their interactions. Holocaust and Genocide Studies,7, 30-50.Blass, T. (1996). Attribution of responsibility and trust in th eMilgram obedience experiment. Journal ofApplied Social Psy-chology, 26, 1529-1535.Bullock, A. (1993). Hitler and Stalin: Parallel lives. New York: Vin-tage.Darley, J. M. (1992). Social organization for the production of evil.Psychology Inquiry, 3, 199-218.D ic ks , H . V. (1972). Licensed mass murder: A socio-psychologicalstudy ofsome SS killers. New York: Basic Books.Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. New York:McGraw-Hill.Kelman, H. C., & Hamilton, V. L. (1989). Crimes ofobedience. To -ward a social psychology ofauthority and responsibility. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press.

Levine, S. (1997). The development of wickedness From whencedoes evil stem? Psychiatric Annals, 27, 617-623.Lifton, R. J. (1986). The Nazi doctors: Medical killing and the psy-chology ofgenocide. New York: Basic Books.Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal ofAb-normal and Social Psychology, 67 , 371-378.Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view.New York: Harper & Row.Miller, A. G. (1986). The obedience experiments: A case study ofcontroversy in social science. New York: Praeger.Miller, S. (1998). A note on the banality of evil. WQ: The WilsonQuarterly, 12 , 54-59.Parkin, D. (1985). Introduction. In D. Parkin (Ed.), The anthropologyof evil (pp. 1-25). Oxford, England: Blackwell.Rosenbaum, R. (1998). Explaining Hitler. New York: RandomHouse.Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). Theperson and the situation: Per-spectives of socialpsychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins ofgenocide and othergroup violence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Zimbardo, P. G. , Haney, C. , Banks, W. C. , & Jaffe, D. (1973, April8). The mind is a formidable jailer: A Pirandellian prison. TheNew York Times Magazine, pp. 38-60.



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