OBEDIENCE AND HOLOCAUST
Essay question: Undertake an inquiry into the nature, causes, and consequences of obedience, making reference to the work of at least two social psychologists. Utilise either of the two videos provided in the Week 10: Psychology Essay Supplementary Materials folder. Towards the end of your discussion, indicate why empirical methods are important. Teachers instructions: This essay question focuses on the work of Milgram, Chaleff, and/or Zimbardo with regards to the concept of ‘obedience’. You need to demonstrate knowledge of the arguments, methods and conclusions of these psychologists. Further to this, the videos in the Supplementary Materials provide examples of how historians have applied the work of social psychologists to explain events during the Holocaust, namely, how could ‘ordinary men’ (Christopher Browning’s phrase) kill so many people, against what could be described as a normal sense of conscience? The first video features a lecture by Browning (Lecture 2 – Why Did They Kill? Revisiting the Perpetrators – Browning – Bogdanow lectures 2015) which was part of a series of 3 lectures presented in Manchester in 2015 (as part of the annual Bogdanow Lecture series). Browning’s most well-known book is Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The second video, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (How Did Ordinary Citizens Become Murderers?), also features Browning, but records a public debate on the subject (the title of the video) involving Wendy Lower, who was author of Hitler′s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. This provides interesting examples demonstrating the role of women as perpetrators in the Holocaust. Note that you cannot spend all 2,000 words outlining the experiments and then the historical application of the arguments (to help explain the Holocaust), as the last part of the question asks you to consider the importance of the methods used by the social psychologists. In this regard you can listen to Christopher Browning explaining the experiments – what does Browning make of such methods?