Page - 41 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

Trauma and Conformity | 41www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 35–46 The experiments shown by Ruzowitzky have one common characteristic. All of them demonstrate how social pressure drives people to formulate opinions and act in the presence of others differently from how they would express themselves and behave when alone. They show how social pressure can bring people to commit mass murder at times of war. They demonstrate how individuals can become mur- derers through the presence of other individuals and through orders they receive. The men who killed were “ordinary”. They were policemen redeployed to fight in the war and soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the German army. We have no reason to expect them to be more readily violent towards civilians, a violence that was expected of members of the SS. (We know now that SS soldiers also did not differ greatly from a cross-section of the German population. The simi- larities between SS troops and the modal German population were consider- ably greater than the dissimilarities.)9 The next section of this article deals with three social-psychological ex- periments that according to Ruzowitzky explain the killing carried out by Ein- satzgruppen: the conformity experiments of Solomon Asch, the obedience ex- periments of Stanley Milgram, and the bystander-effect experiments of John Darley and Bibb Latané. I conclude with a reflection on the explanation for the killing given by Ruzowitzky. CONFORMITY In the conformity experiments carried out by Asch, participants had to judge the length of lines.10 The experiments were performed by groups of eight persons, of whom seven were actors and only one a real test subject. This one person sup- posed that all participants were test subjects. The participants received a card with a single line on it, and were then shown a card with three lines, of which one was the same length as the line on the first card. The subjects had to determine which of the three lines was the same length as the line on the first card. The sev- en actors unanimously pointed to the wrong line. What would the test subject do? The most important result of the experiment was that many test subjects accommodated themselves to the evidently wrong judgement of the others in their group. They adjusted their own view to the views of the others. What is less well known, however, is that about 60 per cent did not conform. We do not know anything of the personal characteristics of these last individuals, just we know nothing of those who did adapt to conform. There was no explicit coercion in Asch’s experiments. The only pressure came from the presence of people who judged incorrectly, with whom the test subject formed a temporary group during the experiment. 9 De Swaan 2014. 10 Asch 1951.