I think the idea is to understand how seemingly normal people can do “evil” things.
Yale and Harvard are pretty impressive credentials…I guess he didn’t have to run his experimental design past anyone first?
We watched the experiment for psych 101 some decades ago. I’m not at all surprised that people questioned the ethics.
I also ran across something he wrote about the experiment in this book.
His footnote, on page 794 says:
I would be curious to read that, but I’ve never seen it.
When you say his experiment said no such thing, I’m not sure how to interpret that. Do you mean that he never explicitly mentioned Nazis, or perhaps that he wished to connect them but in the your opinion, his experiment results don’t support the conclusion? In this piece his final paragraph says:
Another take on the experiment, from Berkeley, from 2014 as well.
https://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7article/article35
I don’t see anything about it being perceived by participants as absurd etc. in that article. I’m not implying that your assertion is wrong—but they published both in the same year so they potentially have the same benefit of hindsight, so to speak.
I do not believe Canaris was actually an active participant in the bomb plot. He certainly undermined the Nazi regime in countless other ways, though.
Guess what other famous experiment has numerous gaping flaws and outright fraud, and doesn’t show what it purports to show?
Notably one of the most dramatic episodes of someone breaking down turns out was entirely fake:
As is one of my regular catchphrases in these boards: Explanation is not Justification – or Excuse; but if it is an explanation, then it can be useful to detect recurrences or call out what circumstances lead to it.
True. But it is noteworthy that someone who has put too much effort in serving “Darth Vader” is quite unlikely to feel remorse. Or say I’m sorry.
Happy Birthday, JRDelirious! 
I find it hard to believe that this couple didn’t know what was going on. In fact, I think it’s hard to believe that most German people didn’t know about the camps and the goings-on to some degree.
I have nothing but contempt for Speer. There are a couple of books about him that expose what an empty, soul-less entity he was. The best example of his total lack of morality is the fact that he died of a stroke while shtupping his mistress in a London hotel room.
‘shtupping’ is a marvelously ironic word choice, given that it is Yiddish colloquium. Thanks for the smile, subtle though it was.
Thank you.
Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one is confronted with the consequences of his decision to carry out the evil act. The person who assumes responsibility has evaporated.
Or they find some sort of perverted logic to glory in their responsibility. Himmler went so far as to say, in the speech that was recorded on disc and which Speer was known to have attended, that precisely because the mass murder programme was a “difficult decision” and to be directly involved in it something to “endure”, and yet to remain “decent”, that somehow made the perpetrators more admirable. But of course the system was also constructed to give all the desk-jockeys and others indirectly involved (but nonetheless essential to its running), as well as the general public, the euphemistic cover story about “resettlement”.
Not an apology, but the story of Rudolf Hess is interesting. i suspect he saw how things were going and tried to make the best out of a bad situation. It didn’t work and was perhaps doomed from the start, but it makes me wonder.