A Study In Ordinary Evil

Sixty years ago, a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, demonstrated something that it took me two decades to learn: the people most likely to end up inside coercive systems are often not weak or gullible. Rather, they are ordinary rather than distinctive.

When I tell people I spent twenty years inside a cultic group, the first reaction I usually get is a kind of polite confusion. They look at my biography - Princeton grad, Division I athlete, modeling career, family of accomplished siblings - and they try to reconcile it with the word “cult.” Their faces are saying something they are too polite to say out loud.

People like you don’t end up in a cultic group. What was wrong with you?

I used to take the question personally. At first, I would offer answers that were partly true and partly defensive, like I was young or I was looking for meaning or I was vulnerable in some way I could not articulate. All of those things were accurate, yet none of them answered the question.

This is because the question itself is the problem. It assumes that people who end up in cults belong to a special category of person. The common thinking is that these people are weak, gullible, and damaged in a way that others are not, which is not necessarily true.

Mind you, this is coming someone who steadfastly held on to the belief that he was way too “normal” to ever become involved in a cult. Even as the group’s behavior became more and more ‘culty’ over the years, I refused to believe it could be one. That refusal is tied directly to an assumption we must dismantle if we are ever going to find space to heal from the trauma, carnage, and the abuse cults leave behind.

My reasoning went something like this: I was in the group. Someone like me doesn’t end up in a cult. Therefore, the group I’m in could not be a cult. The logic was airtight from the inside.

It was also wrong.

This belief that the people who get involved in cults are ‘other people’ with unique deficits is the exact factor that creates the greatest vulnerability. Being ‘normal’ doesn’t protect us. In fact, research says the opposite.

In the summer of 1961, a young Stanley Milgram set up an experiment at Yale University. He was not yet thirty. He had just earned his doctorate at Harvard and was preoccupied with a question that had been on the world’s mind for years: How had the Nazi machine been operated, in such detail and at such scale, by people who appeared, when finally arrested, to be ordinary people?

Milgram’s renowned experiment was designed to test whether the apparent ordinariness of people who participated in an atrocity was a peculiarity of mid-century Germany or a feature of average people. He recruited subjects from New Haven, Connecticut through a newspaper advertisement. The subjects were told they were participating in a study of memory and learning. They were assigned the role of ‘teacher.’ They were instructed by a man in a lab coat to administer electric shocks of increasing voltage to a ‘learner’ in an adjoining room whenever the learner answered questions incorrectly.

The shocks were not real. The learner was an actor. The man in the lab coat was the experiment’s observer. The voltage panel ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts. The label at 450 volts read, ‘Danger: Severe Shock.’

As the experiment progressed, the learner began to protest. He yelled. He complained of a heart condition. He begged the teacher to stop. Eventually, he fell silent. The man in the lab coat instructed the teacher to continue. He said, calmly and without apparent emotion, that the experiment required them to proceed.

In the best-known version of the study, sixty-five percent of the ordinary citizens in the study administered the full 450 volts. Milgram’s conclusion, delivered in his 1974 book Obedience to Authority, was that the participants in his study did not fall into a category of people sharing similar characteristics. They were the residents of New Haven, Connecticut. Your neighbors. Us.

Decades later, psychologist Gina Perry took a closer look at Milgram’s research and showed that the initial claim of sixty-five percent came from only one of roughly two dozen variations he ran, and that obedience across those variations swung wildly from almost no one to almost everyone depending on the conditions. Furthermore, the man in the lab coat did not consistently confine himself to the four scripted lines; he often improvised, cajoled, and pressured. A meaningful number of participants later said they had suspected the shocks were not real. So, in the end, there was more to Milgram’s story, and also, greater complexity than what was broadly published.

What was not overturned, and what has, in fact, been replicated, including in modern, ethically constrained versions of the study, is the core finding that normal, ordinary people, placed under the pressure of an authority they perceive as legitimate, will do things they would never have predicted themselves capable of doing. So, while the percentages are debatable, the mechanism on which they are based is not.

Also in 1961 the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had coordinated the transport of millions to the Nazi concentration camps, had begun in Jerusalem. Psychiatrists evaluated him and found him to be psychologically normal. He had a wife and four children. He was a competent bureaucrat with no apparent sadistic tendencies. The world had expected a monster. Instead, the world learned Eichmann was an ordinary clerk who was obedient to his superiors.

Hannah Arendt was sitting in the Eichmann trial while Milgram was running his experiments. She was a German-Jewish refugee who had escaped Nazi Germany. She had every personal reason to expect that Eichmann, as a senior Nazi party member, would be revealed as diabolical. What troubled her instead moved her to coin a phrase that has shaped moral philosophy ever since: the banality of evil.

In her 1963 New Yorker series, later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt wrote that Eichmann was not motivated by hatred or by ideology or by any of the dramatic interior conditions one might have expected. He was motivated by ambition, by the desire to perform his job competently, by what she identified as the absence of self-reflective thought. He had not done evil because he was an evil man. He had done evil because he had not stopped to think about what he was doing.

The banality of evil, as Arendt defined it, does not mean that evil is unimportant or that perpetrators should be excused. It means that the conditions under which normal, ordinary people commit atrocities are mundane such as careerism, conformity, the willingness to follow instructions, and the avoidance of the discomfort that comes from raising objections.

Arendt and Milgram, from opposite ends - one in a courtroom, one in a laboratory - arrived at the same conclusion. Most participants in coercive systems are not monsters. They are people whose situational pressures, such as institutional authority, social conformity, and the perceived legitimacy of the structure they are inside, are stronger than their personal capacity to resist.

For most of the time I have been doing this work, I have treated the cult-recovery literature as a specialized domain. Steven Hassan, Margaret Singer, Janja Lalich, and Robert Lifton are all the foundational thinkers of the field, and their work has been the language I use to explain what happened to me.

But the foundational research on which the cult-recovery field is built is not specialized. It is mainstream social psychology. Singer and Hassan both cite Milgram. Lifton’s thought-reform work was contemporary with Milgram’s. The understanding that ordinary people will do extraordinary things under institutional pressure is the same understanding whether the institution is the Nazi machine, a 1960s Yale laboratory, a corporate compliance program, or in my case, an ill-intended stranger who approached me on a Nantucket beach when I was sixteen.

In my case, the institutional pressure was not a man in a lab coat. It was a charismatic teacher who claimed spiritual authority, surrounded by other followers who reinforced his authority, operating inside a framework that discredited any objection from outside the group. The mechanism was identical in structure to what Milgram demonstrated in his lab. The institutional packaging was different.

Why Milgram’s work is so important is that it tests the assumption that people who end up inside any kind of controlling, coercive, abusive group or relationship must be different from the average person. Milgram’s subjects believed they were administering shocks to a learner. They were showing something about themselves that they likely would not have identified as immoral. Eichmann’s colleagues believed they were doing their jobs. But they were actually participating in genocide. I believed I was pursuing a spiritual life. Yet, I was actually being absorbed into a coercive structure that was extracting my labor, my money, and the better part of two decades of my life.

The people I have known who spent years of their lives involved in toxic coercive groups also thought they had found a spiritual path, a community, a movement, a teacher, and a way of life that made sense to them. The word cult was applied later, by them or by someone else, after enough time inside had revealed what the group actually was. This distinction is not a technicality. It is the entire configuration of how recruitment into cultic relationships works.

There is one conviction that the Milgram research and the cult-recovery literature share. It is that recognition of one’s own vulnerability is the beginning of protection from those who can exploit it. It is not a guarantee. But it gives a person a fighting chance and an awareness of the pressures they will inevitably meet.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said it best when he observed that the line between good and evil runs not between nations or parties but straight through every human heart. The responsibility falls on each of us to find out, for ourselves, independently and subjectively, where that line lies, and to keep watching it, because the line moves as we move through our lives.

Donna Flagg

Ordinary Evil