Why Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann sat in a glass booth in a Jerusalem courtroom and told the world he was just following orders. He had organized the deportation of millions of Jewish people to concentration camps. He had managed the logistics of industrialized murder. And his defense was that he was doing what he was told by legitimate authority.Three months later, a young psychologist named Stanley Milgram sat in his office at Yale University and asked a question that would define his career: was Eichmann special, or would anyone do what he did?Milgram believed the answer would be reassuring. He told his colleagues and students before running the experiment that he expected only a small, pathological minority to go all the way. He predicted that most people would refuse long before the shocks became dangerous. He was confident that ordinary Americans, unlike the Germans who had participated in the Holocaust, would stop when their conscience told them to.He was wrong.The Experiment Nobody ExpectedThe basic design of Milgram’s experiment is now famous. A volunteer sits in front of a shock machine. A man in a gray lab coat, holding a clipboard, stands behind them. In a separate room, another person, secretly an actor, answers questions. Every wrong answer means a shock. Every shock is higher than the last. The machine goes from 15 volts to 450 volts. The labels escalate from “Slight Shock” to “Danger: Severe Shock” to a final red label that simply reads “XXX.”At 150 volts the actor begins screaming. At 300 volts he pounds on the wall and begs to be released. After 330 volts he falls silent. The volunteer does not know whether the man in the other room is unconscious or dead. The lab coat stands behind them and says four things, always in the same order, always calmly: “Please continue.” “The experiment requires that you continue.” “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” “You have no other choice. You must go on.”65% of participants went all the way to 450 volts. Every single participant went to at least 300 volts. These were not sadists or sociopaths. They were ordinary people recruited through a newspaper ad in New Haven, Connecticut. Teachers. Salesmen. Engineers. Postal workers. And two out of three of them delivered what they believed was a lethal electric shock to a stranger because a man in a lab coat told them to.Milgram published his initial findings in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963. In his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority, he introduced the concept that explained what he had witnessed. He called it the agentic state: the psychological shift that occurs when a person stops seeing themselves as responsible for their own actions and begins seeing themselves as an agent carrying out someone else’s will. The moral weight transfers upward, from the person doing the harm to the authority giving the order. And once that transfer happens, the person is capable of things they would never do on their own.What the Variations RevealedThe original experiment told Milgram what he did not want to know: most people will obey. But Milgram did not stop there. He ran 18 variations of the experiment with 636 total participants, and the variations revealed something far more useful. They showed what breaks obedience.When the man in the lab coat left the room and gave instructions by telephone, obedience dropped sharply. Physical distance from the authority weakened its hold. When the experiment was moved from the prestigious campus of Yale University to a set of run-down offices in Bridgeport, Connecticut, obedience dropped to 47.5%. The authority’s institutional credibility mattered. When the lab coat was removed and replaced with an ordinary person in street clothes, obedience dropped to 20%. The appearance of authority, not its substance, was doing much of the work.But the most revealing variation involved proximity to the victim. In the original design, the volunteer could hear the actor screaming through the wall. When Milgram moved the actor into the same room so the volunteer could see the person they were shocking, obedience dropped significantly. And when the volunteer had to physically hold the actor’s hand down onto a shock plate, obedience dropped further still. The closer you are to the human cost of your actions, the harder it is to let the authority override your conscience.There was also a variation that should keep every one of us up at night. When the volunteer did not have to press the button themselves but could instruct an assistant to do it, obedience rose to 92.5%. Nearly everyone complied. Distance from the act itself, even by one step, was enough to eliminate almost all resistance.What This Tells Us About MAGAThe application to the current political moment is not subtle, and it does not require exaggeration.Milgram designed the experiment to understand how the Holocaust happened. He wanted to know how millions of ordinary people could participate in atrocity. The answer was not that Germans were uniquely evil. The answer was that human beings, across every culture and every demographic, have a built-in response to legitimate authority that can override personal morality. The agentic state is not a flaw in certain people. It is a feature of the human brain, shaped by tens of thousands of years of tribal hierarchy where deferring to the leader kept you alive.When MAGA supporters defend the detention of people without trial, when they justify the deportation of American citizens, when they repeat the phrase “they should have just complied” about someone who was killed by police, they are not engaged in moral reasoning. They are in the agentic state. The moral responsibility has been transferred upward. If the authority says it is acceptable, it must be acceptable. The man in the lab coat said continue.But Milgram’s variations tell us something important about what can break this state.Physical proximity to the victims matters. It is easy to cheer for “Mass Deportation Now” when the people being deported are abstractions. It is harder when the person being taken is your neighbor, your coworker, or the parent of a child in your kid’s school. This is why the administration works so hard to dehumanize the targets. The further the victim is from the person complying, the easier the compliance becomes.The credibility of the authority matters. When the lab coat was removed, obedience collapsed. Every time Trump’s authority is diminished, every time his competence is publicly questioned, every time the institutional trappings of his power are weakened, the psychological hold loosens.And the presence of dissenting peers matters. In another variation Milgram did not include in his most famous papers but discussed in his book, when the volunteer was placed alongside two other apparent participants who refused to continue, the volunteer’s own obedience dropped dramatically. Watching someone else say no makes it psychologically possible to say no yourself.The 35% Who Said NoThere is a detail in Milgram’s experiment that gets far less attention than the 65% who obeyed. 35% of participants refused. They pushed back. They said no. Some of them stood up and walked out of the room.These were not people with special training or unusual moral courage. They were the same cross-section of ordinary Americans as everyone else in the study. The difference was not in who they were. It was in what they chose to do at the moment the authority told them to continue.Milgram noted that the participants who refused tended to be the ones who maintained a sense of personal responsibility throughout the experiment. They never fully entered the agentic state. They continued to see themselves as the ones doing the harm, not as instruments of someone else’s will. They kept the moral weight on their own shoulders.That is the psychological line that separates compliance from resistance. Not intelligence. Not education. Not political affiliation. Whether you see yourself as responsible for your own actions, or whether you have handed that responsibility to someone else.Hannah Arendt, covering the Eichmann trial that had inspired Milgram’s experiment in the first place, called what she observed the banality of evil. Eichmann was not a monster. He was a bureaucrat. He did not hate the people he helped murder. He simply did not think about them at all. He had entered the agentic state so completely that the question of personal responsibility had become irrelevant to him. The authority had spoken. He was just following orders.Milgram proved that Eichmann was not an aberration. He was a data point. And the data says that most of us, under the right conditions, would do exactly what he did.The question Milgram’s experiment poses is not whether Trump supporters are stupid or evil. It is whether they have outsourced their sense of right and wrong to someone who does not know their name and does not care whether they suffer for his decisions. And the research says most of them have. Not because they are broken. Because the human brain was built to do exactly this when a legitimate authority is present and the victims are far enough away.The 35% who refused are proof that the agentic state is not inevitable. People can resist. But resistance requires one thing that the current political environment is designed to eliminate: the continued belief that you, personally, are responsible for what happens when you comply.History has never needed monsters. It has always had plenty of people who were just following orders.SourcesMilgram, S. (1963). Behavioral Study of Obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking Press. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe