ABSTRACT
The deliberate slaughter of millions of people in this century solely because of their group membership has prompted considerable discussion of the nature and causes of evil. Social psychology as a discipline has given relatively little attention to the problem of evil in society, and those discussions in this field that do exist typically regard evil actions as only varieties of aggression without any characteristics that distinguish them from other forms of intentional mistreatment of others. The words bad and wrong are The Situationist Perspective on Evil used all too broadly and do not necessarily convey the sense of moral repugnance that usually have Social psychologists, by and large, do not think of in mind when we speak of evil. Achieving this more evil actions as the product of evil personalities. Social psychology manifests the particular failure in its concentration on the relatively lower intermediate-status persons who complied with their superiors' policies rather than on the higher-ups who initiated these policies.
