Genetically, yes, if I was born into a settler society, was accepted, and was given carte blanch to merk kids etc etc. but fortunately by existing I wound up with a bunch of critiques of nationalism. Orders are easier to follow if it’s not just your commanding officer but also your entire society telling you to shoot the kid. Your friends in the unit and in wider society will call you a hero and buy you drinks and will laugh at your jokes about it. It simply isn’t the same as your CO telling you to shoot and you having a 60% chance of pulling the trigger, let alone eagerly do it. (on this point, Milgram talks about the appearance of “legitimacy” of authority, for the experiments to work you have to believe in the legitimacy of the “Scientist” actor, which requires that you have beliefs about scientists in the first place)
While I think there is some validity to Milgram’s experiments, they were typically run on a particular sort of person brought up in our modern hierarchical society, who believe in the moral character of those hierarchies etc. They are also not a total explanation for why say… it is Israeli snipers are doing this routinely. It also doesn’t explain where those orders come from and why. Also, you don’t know if they’re being given orders or if they’re just shooting at opportunity targets of their own volition.
That’s not to say I’m immune to propaganda or whatever. I am, however, probably immune to Israeli propaganda at this point (at least the sort that would lead to shooting 5 year old Palestinians in the head). I have a hard time even thinking of how I would justify killing a 5 year old even if they were a die hard reactionary, let alone lazily headshot one in the street because I felt like it. The IDF tiktoks and telegram videos are pretty gleeful and snipers are rarely considered the most compassionate soldiers. That’s not to say I couldn’t ever have been, in the right environment and the right military giving orders, but at this point I don’t think I could be.
(Also, I hate that Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment get lumped together, the Milgram experiment had controls and structure and was repeated a bunch of times with different groups and victims, whereas the stanford experiment had no control, structure, and had a lot of active involvement from Zimbardo who somehow had a career after it. Obviously they’re both cases of experiments that would not pass a modern ethics committee.
There is some more writing on this outside of Milgram. Teddy Adorno did some writing on “The Authoritarian Personality” which talks about hierarchical thinking, including following orders (but also about giving orders and how legitimate you view orders). He does some of his own science, but I thought it was pretty shoddy tbh, but he does a literature review as well and offers a passable critique and conversation. There’s also discussion (in other books) about the Einsatzgruppen, which suggested even in pretty Nazi operations, only about 20% of people eagerly followed the direct order to execute partisans, 60% of people were pretty grumpy about it and were psychologically negatively affected, and 20% would kick up a fuss and you’d likely remove them from execution squad. One of the reasons for the mechanisation of the final solution was the psychological harm firing squads were doing to German soldiers.
This is all from memory, sorry, I used to be more interested in this subject directly)
Genetically, yes, if I was born into a settler society, was accepted, and was given carte blanch to merk kids etc etc. but fortunately by existing I wound up with a bunch of critiques of nationalism. Orders are easier to follow if it’s not just your commanding officer but also your entire society telling you to shoot the kid. Your friends in the unit and in wider society will call you a hero and buy you drinks and will laugh at your jokes about it. It simply isn’t the same as your CO telling you to shoot and you having a 60% chance of pulling the trigger, let alone eagerly do it. (on this point, Milgram talks about the appearance of “legitimacy” of authority, for the experiments to work you have to believe in the legitimacy of the “Scientist” actor, which requires that you have beliefs about scientists in the first place)
While I think there is some validity to Milgram’s experiments, they were typically run on a particular sort of person brought up in our modern hierarchical society, who believe in the moral character of those hierarchies etc. They are also not a total explanation for why say… it is Israeli snipers are doing this routinely. It also doesn’t explain where those orders come from and why. Also, you don’t know if they’re being given orders or if they’re just shooting at opportunity targets of their own volition.
That’s not to say I’m immune to propaganda or whatever. I am, however, probably immune to Israeli propaganda at this point (at least the sort that would lead to shooting 5 year old Palestinians in the head). I have a hard time even thinking of how I would justify killing a 5 year old even if they were a die hard reactionary, let alone lazily headshot one in the street because I felt like it. The IDF tiktoks and telegram videos are pretty gleeful and snipers are rarely considered the most compassionate soldiers. That’s not to say I couldn’t ever have been, in the right environment and the right military giving orders, but at this point I don’t think I could be.
(Also, I hate that Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment get lumped together, the Milgram experiment had controls and structure and was repeated a bunch of times with different groups and victims, whereas the stanford experiment had no control, structure, and had a lot of active involvement from Zimbardo who somehow had a career after it. Obviously they’re both cases of experiments that would not pass a modern ethics committee.
There is some more writing on this outside of Milgram. Teddy Adorno did some writing on “The Authoritarian Personality” which talks about hierarchical thinking, including following orders (but also about giving orders and how legitimate you view orders). He does some of his own science, but I thought it was pretty shoddy tbh, but he does a literature review as well and offers a passable critique and conversation. There’s also discussion (in other books) about the Einsatzgruppen, which suggested even in pretty Nazi operations, only about 20% of people eagerly followed the direct order to execute partisans, 60% of people were pretty grumpy about it and were psychologically negatively affected, and 20% would kick up a fuss and you’d likely remove them from execution squad. One of the reasons for the mechanisation of the final solution was the psychological harm firing squads were doing to German soldiers.
This is all from memory, sorry, I used to be more interested in this subject directly)