Psychology / Unit 13 Psych 1483 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Why Ordinary People Did It
The idea
Explaining institutional harm means combining role, norm, obedience, conformity, deindividuation, and diffusion into one account without reaching for individual defect.
In practice
One documented institutional failure reconstructed in full: the roles assigned and what they authorized, the norm that made objection costly, the authority whose instruction was proximate and whose responsibility was distant, the unanimity that suppressed the first dissent, the anonymity that lowered the threshold, and the diffusion that left no one holding the decision. Ends by naming the one intervention at each stage that the evidence says would have interrupted it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
- 1183Situationism
- 1185The Fundamental Attribution Error
- 1193Social Role
- 1199Social Norm
- 1211Conformity
- 1213The Asch Studies
- 1215Normative Social Influence
- 1220Obedience
- 1221The Milgram Studies
- 1222The "Obedience Requires Cruel People" Error
- 1226Groupthink
- 1234Deindividuation
- 1260Diffusion of Responsibility
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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