Just Following Orders:
Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience
by Emilie A. Caspar (Cambridge University Press)
Continuing our Decision ’24 special coverage, a book about why people go along with acts of genocide, which is far too practical as knowledge for the U.S. in the near future than I would have assumed in the recent past.1
I am not going to sum up The Milgram Experiment as I assume the readers here will have a grasp of it, even if more through its misrepresentations and misapplications.2 The author is a neuroscientist working with research into similar questions of the nature of obedience to immoral commands and its refusal, with the added twist of doing field research in places where genocides have taken place, and thus interviewing and studying perpetrators.
The book is not moving towards some grand thesis and unified theory of misery, but the format of each of the individual chapters is well-designed and good at explaining whatever aspect of the question of obedience and its justifications that a particular study considers. It is also excellent in discussing what the limitations or flaws of any particular study are.
Owing to the author’s specialty, many of the studies come at the question from the perspective of neuroscience and what is happening in an electrical or biological level in someone’s brain. This made me a dubious about the book. Again, I am not going to sum up the Expired Salmon as I assume you know it. But there are a handful of reasons why this sort of research is more interesting in the question of obedience. People lie, to others and themselves, about this. Something could be honesty or a post hoc rationalization, or even nothing at all. Therefore, empirical data showing agentic areas firing or not is useful in context of what is being done or said. The one3 that I felt the most interesting was to view obedience as a sort of cognitive bias. Not towards authority itself (although the mere existence of being in a hierarchy reduces a sense of authority, even for the leadership), but as a sort of the ethical equivalent of texting while driving, where it is more the excess of personal relations to track rather than the sublimation that creates the problem.
The compelling part of the text is the quotes from the research subjects. This obviously applies to the case studies portion of talking to the perpetrators about how they explain their own actions. It equally applies (and corrects Milgram) to the subjects of the experimental research. That people play Calvinball to backfill makes sense, but some of the people who do not make chilling statements. And the comedic highlight of the book is the torsions of the scientists to provoke non-compliance, functionally the lesson of the research that started all of this, but that starts to approach sketch comedy in its convolutions and frustrations.
The book has odd structural flings. Tangents seems incorrect as they are not discursive, but vestigial. The stand out example is when the Kitty Genovese story is told. As I started to warm up my letter to the editor about how the conventional wisdom on the story is incorrect, the author then makes the point of noting the incorrectness of said wisdom, and then end there, without further reference.
In some ways, the whole of the part of the study in Cambodia is like this. While looking to use both Rwanda and Cambodia as the places to get real data on humans ethically, the Cambodian genocide is unusual in terms of genocides, up to and including an idiosyncratic way of viewing it as one without perpetrators, only victims. This may be philosophically true; there is a section of the book about how psychically damaging genocidal actions are on the perpetrators, even to the suggestion that this may be one of the inflection points for preventing genocides. But it comprehensively frustrates the author’s intended study. I like its inclusion, it is both facilitating and becomes a sort of negative example to the Rwanda story, but like the other inclusions it is a loop-the-loop.
While the academic price point makes this more of a library read, there is plenty of interesting material here about how people enact evil. Read if you are interested in a cornucopia of up to date research on the subject, particularly if you are the kind of reader looking for better questions rather than quickie answers.
- It was supposed to be space travel. It was supposed to be space travel. ↩︎
- It is interesting that there is something we refer to as The Milgram Experiment, when he did so many. ↩︎
- I worry that I am doing the typical science journalism thing here of overstating a framework as a pithy conclusion, so disclaimer declared. ↩︎
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