ABSTRACT
In a sense, this chapter does not fit well in the frame of this book on Milgram’s paradigmatic research on obedience to authority. It is less about extreme forms of interpersonal compliance to the demands of unjust authority than it is about emerging conformity pressures in “total situations” in which the processes of deindividuation and dehumanization are institutionalized. However, in another sense, it is the natural complementary bookend to chapters tied to Milgram’s obedience paradigm, which between them hold up the lessons of the power of social situations to overwhelm individual dispositions and even to degrade the quality of human nature.
