Hannah Arendt’s insight into the psychology of obedience finds deep resonance—and some challenge—in the work of social psychologists who have explored how ordinary people become complicit in harm. The classic experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo are especially revealing. Milgram’s Obedience to Authority study, conducted in the early 1960s, was designed to test how far individuals would go when instructed by an authority figure to harm another person. Participants assigned the role of “teacher” were told to administer electric shocks to a “learner” every time the latter made an error, with the voltage increasing each time. The learner’s cries of pain were pre-recorded, but the subjects believed them real. Despite hesitation, sixty-five percent of the participants went all the way to the maximum voltage, simply because the experimenter, wearing a lab coat, told them they must continue.

The standard interpretation of Milgram’s findings is that ordinary individuals can commit harmful acts when obedience displaces moral agency. Authority can anesthetise the conscience; moral autonomy dissolves into procedural compliance. Milgram’s work was often cited as an empirical counterpart to Arendt’s “banality of evil,” showing how decency collapses not in the face of hatred, but in the comfort of obedience. Later researchers such as Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher refined this view, arguing that people do not obey blindly—they obey when they identify with the authority or believe the cause to be legitimate. In that sense, obedience is not passive surrender but active alignment. We follow because we want to follow.

Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment a decade later dramatised similar dynamics. College students assigned as guards in a mock prison quickly adopted abusive, humiliating behaviors toward their peers cast as prisoners. The experiment that was meant to last two weeks had to be terminated after six days. The lesson was not merely that power corrupts, but that role structures, group identity and conformity can make cruelty feel normal. Zimbardo later drew explicit parallels between his findings and modern political cruelty, noting how dehumanisation and the demand for loyalty can reproduce the guard-prisoner mentality in populist movements and state practices alike.

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