The Sadistic Personality

Some researchers, perhaps with the Perverted Prude in mind, argued that the true explanation for Milgram’s results is the Sadistic Personality: the experimenter’s orders remove our inhibitions, and permit us to act out our repressed urge to hurt other people for pleasure.

The problem is that there is no evidence that we have such an urge. None of Milgram’s compliant subjects seemed to take even the slightest pleasure in administering punishment, and many of them seemed downright agonized. They protested, they bit their lips until they bled, they broke into sweat or hysterical giggles. One went into convulsions. Milgram writes, “I observed a

mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within twenty minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse... At one point he pushed his fist into his forehead and muttered: ‘Oh God, let’s stop it.’ And yet he continued to respond to every word of the experimenter, and obeyed to the end.”^[451] This hardly describes a sadist at work.

And, as it happens, the researchers who proposed the Sadistic Personality had an ax to grind.^[452] They claimed, based on Rorschach tests done on the Nuremberg defendants and Adolf Eichmann, that every last one of the top Nazis was a psychopath. Like Professor Goldhagen today, they wanted to show that there was nothing ordinary about Hitler’s executioners, nothing banal about Nazi evil. Their interest in Milgram seemed largely a competitive interest in shoring up their own theory of Nazism.

But their studies were flawed and their argument fallacious. Without interviews and other evidence of clinical pathology, Rorschach diagnoses are quack psychiatry; in any case, the researchers used a discredited method to analyze their Nazi Rorschachs. More basically, Rorschach diagnoses are based on deviations from statistical norms - and Milgram compliance is the statistical norm! To say on the basis of Rorschachs that two-thirds of adults are sadists is arithmetically impossible, like saying that all the children are above average.^[453]