Two different articles on the same topic that are contradictory. Is a human being by nature good or bad?

We are in Jerusalem.
Adolf Eichmann, the now defunct Third Reich officer and one of the leaders of the extermination of the Jews, is at the center of an unprecedented media storm.
He sits in front of the judges, without scruples, consider it already guilty.
The process is a sham, and they are not few who suspect him.
But the thing that most surprised the world in those days, was a detail that, shortly afterwards, Hannah Arendt remarked with deep gloss: Eichmann was a loser, not embodied the face of the devil, of evil.
Eichmann was, rather, "anyone."
And "everyone" could, therefore, contrary to expectations, embody evil.
The process ends amid general hysteria of Israel, the indifference of the cynics and the rapture of the nerds.
One of these is Dr. Stanley Milgram, a researcher at the Department of Social Relations at Yale.
The process had raised a question, in fact, on which a scientist like Stanley could not be ignored: during the Nuremberg trials before, during and after the Jerusalem trial, Nazi officers have been justified by claiming that, by default, at the time of crimes, they merely "following orders of their superiors."
Milgram is obsessed with something, do not sleep at night.
It will have reason Hannah Arendt?
It takes an experiment, another hoax.
The purpose?
Understand how the command determining authority in relation to any change in the singular and specific scale of values of each individual in a given context - otherwise known as "destructive obedience."
From the series: as far as I can go through good and kind, if my superior ordered me to hurt - everything is meant by "evil" - eseguirei the order?
Spoiler: deep, our ethical schemes are not as solid as we think, and before situations like these reveal to us the assholes that we know.
The announcement to try guinea pigs for the experiment.
Image: Public domain.
The false advertisement in the newspaper spoke of an experiment on memory and learning processes.
Whoever he intended to take part, then, it would have been rewarded with 4 dollars per hour.
The appeal will have 40 men between 20 and 50 years.
The pattern of the participants was simple: an examiner (the scientist, who in this sense embodies the authorities), teacher (the guinea pig unaware of the plot, and therefore it is the surrogate of Nazi officers) and a student (the accomplice).
The guinea pig should have communicated to the student a series of word combinations - that the other would presumably have had to learn.
When the student was wrong, came an increasingly intense electrical discharge.
He would start between 15 V, "slight shock", 450 V, "very dangerous shock."
The examiner, meanwhile, urged the guinea pigs, the persuaded with sentences like: "The experiment requires that you continue," "has no choice, must continue."
For each wrong answer, therefore, a good electrical discharge, to which corresponded atrocious screams and convulsions by Student - which, however, being an accomplice, an actor, did not receive any download.
It was a farce: the actors were asked to simulate the pain, beg for mercy, pleading.
The result was that more than half of the subjects - about two thirds - heedless of the fainting of the students, the protests and lamentale, not made too many problems to also administer shocks of 450 V.
The subjects, informed only at that point that the experiment was a deception, gave the opportunity for Milgram to write, years later, in 1974, that "the authority has had the upper hand against the moral imperatives of the participants, which They imposed them not to do harm to others.
Ordinary people can become so active part of a terrible destructive process: very few people have the resources needed to resist authority. "
One experiment scheme.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Following the publication of the results, in the mid sixties, the controversy not long in coming: it stressed the psychological stress is not conceivable within a scientific framework, or the 'incompatibility between the experiment and the actual psychology of men they acted during the war.
But the question was different: it was to observe the extent to which a person is willing to believe in his categorical imperative, in his moral conscience.
And on this point, I think, Milgram has revealed, with facts, that we are all potentially shits.
Milgram said the experiment in other contexts, arriving at results consistent with those achieved with the first of the series.
He came out to argue that the subjects under conditions of that kind - that is, a servant / master dialectics - entering that which he later described as "state of agent," a state of mind that is, within which no one feels more individuals rational and responsible for their actions, but mere "agents" of the authority.
And so, individual responsibility has gone to hell.
Recently, some studies, including a transposition of the original experiment, they pointed out some weaknesses of Milgram's work, such as the simplistic division of the subjects in "obedient" and "disobedient".
Hollander insisted on the fact that, simply, "even the participants classified as 'obedient' Milgram did so only after trying different strategies of resistance."
If conscious, therefore, simply prepared in the right way, you possibly can put in check this dialectic: one is the ability to recognize what we consider "evil", the other respect for authority, rules.
The Milgram experiment not only reminds us that we are assholes, but that, after all, we are all a bit 'of Adolf Eichmann, a bit' unlucky, unexpected, "anyone."
The rest is in the hands of our consciences.
And that is scary.

From Vice

In 1961, in one of the most popular jobs to a Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, one of the main perpetrators of the deportation and extermination of the Jewish population, tried to set up their own defensive line itself as a bureaucrat with no direct responsibility, which had not done nothing but execute his orders.

Adolf Eichmann during the trial in 1961.
| Wikimedia Commons
The process - which took place in Israel and broadcast on television - ended with the sentence Eichmann's death, blamed for "ruthlessly pursued the extermination of the Jews."
But the possibility that a hierarch of the SS could defend himself by saying that he only carried out orders profoundly marked public opinion: he was referring to Eichmann and his apparent lack of thought, as well as the inability to process the significance of their actions, that the German writer and thinker Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil."
Especially struck Stanley Milgram, a psychologist and assistant professor, 26, of Yale University, for investigating the dynamics of obedience to the authority conceived one of the most famous (and questionable from an ethical point of view) social experiments ever.
unwitting guinea pigs.
Milgram published in a local newspaper an advertisement to recruit "paid volunteers" who participated in an experiment on learning.
The subjects, aged between 20 and 50 years of age, they were greeted by an investigator that he interpreted to them the elusive "dynamic test", to investigate the effects of punishment on the ability to learn.
The volunteers was given the role of "teachers": each time students (accomplices of the experimenter in disguise) had given the wrong answer, teachers would have to give them a jolt, pressing a button to drive an electricity generator.
experiment diagram "base" Milgram: researcher (V) order to the subject (L) to administer a shock to a "student" (S - actually an accomplice who pretends only to feel pain).
| Wikimedia Commons
The experimenter encouraged teachers hesitant to administer the shock, motivating them with ever more convincing sentences (up to not let their choices).
Every wrong answer the students' saliva-voltage, and with it the screams fake "victims": neither shock nor the complaints (or fainting) of the tortured were true, but the volunteers did not know.
Neither knew they were the real subjects of an experiment which aims to test the limits of obedience to an order received.
Sinister performers.
In presenting the conclusions of his study, Milgram wrote that 65% of his subjects had carried out the orders of authority, continuing with torture despite the obvious pain of the victims.
He made reference to the concentration camps and gas chambers, saying that none of this would have been possible without the mass obedience to orders given.
The results hit the fictional town for portraying bleak that tratteggiavano of human nature.
Are we really so?
But the reality is a bit 'different from what has been transmitted.
Many of the collected data were not published, they were set aside for art or belittled to bring out a more disturbing and proper version of the Eichmann case - as he wrote in the New Scientist Gina Perry, a psychologist who has listened to the recordings of 780 experiments conducted by Milgram, and studied 158 boxes of documents that tell them.
The reserves.
A first problem is that 65% of adult men are ready to execute any type of order, regardless of the consequences, quoted by Milgram: that number was derived only from the first scientific paper on 'obedience, based on forty men.
Really he could claim to have discovered a universal truth, based on the actions of 26 people?
Insubordination.
Another little known detail is that Milgram conducted his famous experiment 23 variations, each with different scenarios and actors.
In one, the actor-student never cried until the shock of 300 volts - after which he pretended to hit the wall and fall unconscious.
In another, the student refused to participate and the investigator occupied both roles of victim and motivator.
But above all, in more than half of the variants, the majority of volunteers disobeyed orders and refused to continue, something of which no consideration was given, in telling the experiment.
The "shock box", the machine to administer the mock shock.
| Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University
I do not do.
The archives tell that the subject tried every move in order to avoid giving the shaking.
Some offered to "exchange role" with the victim; others emphasized the correct answer, so as not to make mistakes and not having to punish the student; others imbrogliarono giving a lower shock due.
Many begged the experimenter, so many we quarreled and challenged him.
Methodological problems.
The Milgram team "sculpted" the results, leaving aside the more "inconvenient" data in a very unscientific way.
In the early stages of research, subjects who resisted more than four times the orders were classified as "disobedient" and exempted from the study (later this same behavior was ignored).
In a variation with an individual woman, the investigator insisted on 26 times in order to continue to provide the shock - rather than an order, coercion.
So manipulated?
Also, what it was really possible that volunteers believe the scenario set up by Milgram?
How many of them could think that a university like Yale allowed to perpetrate potentially lethal torture in its laboratories?
The same Milgram, in a statement in its files, not published, he wondered if the experiments were "significant science or only powerful theater ... I am inclined to accept the second interpretation."
Even the National Science Foundation, one of the first lenders Milgram, expressed reservations about his experiments in 1962, inviting him to make a follow-up of the first study in which he asked volunteers surveyed their interpretation of the facts of Yale.
Milgram took care of this detailed analysis, but did not publish the results for ten years.
Only then it emerged that just 56% of the volunteers had believed that the tremors were true.
A picture of hope.
Not only, in other unpublished analysis it says that people more willing to disobey were those convinced that the tremors were true.
That 44% who doubted their authenticity was, on the contrary, the result inclined to increase the voltage.
The reconstruction of humanity that emerges is richer and more hopeful than narrated by Milgram: no slavish executors of orders, but seekers of meaning, sometimes smart, sometimes awkward, but very often proud and strong.

From Focus