STEPHEN REICHER, ALEX HASLAM AND JAY VAN BAVEL
Inhumanity is as old as humanity itself, yet—curiously—we can trace our modern understanding of it to a single year: 1961. Until then, to the extent that they were ready to grapple with the horrors of the gulag and the gas chamber at all, thinkers sought an answer to the “how could they do that?” question with the idea of a distinct individual pathology. The old presumption was that those who do monstrous things must themselves be monsters. But, in the middle of 1961, two events—many thousands of miles away from each other—coincided to change our understanding entirely. They started to paint the grim picture of the brute within us all—a picture which appeared to be confirmed by the notorious Stanford prison experiment 10 years later. But it is a picture which new evidence is fast unravelling.