Reicher, Stephen; Alexander Haslam and Rakshi Rath. “Making a Virtue of Evil”

In this article, psychologists Stephen Reicher, Alexander Haslam, and Rakshi Rath draw on Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (see Key Texts) and several famous social and psychological experiments to suggest that Eichmann and the participants of the experiments were not acting based on thoughtlessness. Inhumanity is not thoughtless, they argue, and interdisciplinary research tneeds to acknowledge this in order to move on to different, more productive research questions, for example: How can people celebrate acts of inhumanity as acts of virtue? In the second part of the paper they then outline a five-step social identity model that shows how acts of inhumanity can come to be seen as right. They acknowledge that their efforts are partial and preliminary and invite further research in this direction.

Reicher, Stephen, S. Alexander Haslam, and Rakshi Rath. “Making a Virtue of Evil: A Five-Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2008, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 1313-1344.