Milgram Revisited: How Coercion Affects the Mind

Looking down on the defendants' dock during the Nuremberg trials began in 1945. (Credit: The National Archives) In the wake of World War II, Nazi war criminals protested that they had been “only following orders,” which became known as the infamous Nuremberg defense. For decades sociologists, psychologists, and legal scholars have debated whether the defense was just a lame excuse or a valid legal strategy. Now, a team of psychologists says that coercion has a real effect on how the brain perceives the consequences of behavior. The study doesn't dismiss the heinous crimes committed by Adolf Eichmann and low-level officers; however, carrying out orders, researchers discovered, makes people feel passive and less in control, reducing the sense of connection between actions and their consequences. To arrive at their conclusion, researchers put a new spin on a classic — ethically dubious — experiment.