Caveats and Empirical Support for the Banality of Evil Hypothesis

There is considerable empirical support for Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil, particularly from psychology, history, and sociology. Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments in the early 1960s showed that ordinary participants were willing to administer what they believed were painful and even lethal electric shocks to strangers when instructed by an authority figure. The disturbing finding was that most participants were not motivated by sadism but by a desire to follow rules and defer to authority. Similarly, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 found that volunteers randomly assigned to act as guards quickly began to humiliate and abuse those assigned as prisoners. Again, the cruelty arose not from deep personal malice but from role-conformity and institutional dynamics.

Historical studies point in the same direction. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men documents how Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of mostly middle-aged, working-class Germans, participated in mass shootings and deportations during the Holocaust. Browning’s evidence suggests that while some refused, the majority complied because of peer pressure, obedience, and a routinized sense of duty. They were not extraordinary monsters, but ordinary men acting within a system. Studies of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 reach similar conclusions: many perpetrators were farmers and neighbors who acted under local pressures and social conformity rather than ideological fanaticism.

Sociological research also reveals how bureaucratic routines can produce violence without overt malice. Work by Michael Lipsky on street-level bureaucracy and Didier Fassin on policing shows that ordinary administrative decisions—such as denying asylum claims or carrying out evictions—can inflict immense harm while being justified as the neutral application of policy. Stanley Cohen’s studies of denial demonstrate how citizens and officials alike use euphemism and distancing to make such harms easier to carry out or ignore.

Taken together, this body of research strengthens Arendt’s claim that the greatest evils are often committed not by demonic individuals but by ordinary people who, through obedience, conformity, and thoughtlessness, participate in destructive systems.

Some critics argue that Arendt overstated the “banality” in Eichmann’s case. Archival work and court transcripts suggest that he was more ideologically committed to antisemitism and Nazism than she acknowledged. Historians such as David Cesarani and Bettina Stangneth point out that Eichmann displayed genuine enthusiasm for the extermination project, not just thoughtless obedience. From this perspective, the banality thesis risks underplaying the ideological zeal that can drive perpetrators.

However, the empirical record remains mixed. On one side, studies like Browning’s Ordinary Men and Straus’s work on Rwanda emphasize the ordinariness of participants and the powerful pull of conformity, role expectations, and bureaucratic obedience. On the other side, research on Nazi elites and SS officers often reveals genuine ideological conviction and sometimes sadistic motivation. The two perspectives may not be mutually exclusive: many large-scale atrocities require a relatively small number of committed ideologues to set the tone and create the structures, and a much larger group of ordinary people who comply, follow orders, or simply fail to resist.

Arendt’s phrasing—“the banality of evil”—captured one side of this equation: the way ordinary functionaries, like clerks, medics, soldiers, and police, enact massive harms without reflection. Her critics remind us that ideology and hatred can also provide deep motivation. Empirical evidence suggests both are true. Atrocities emerge from a combination of thoughtless obedience, routinization, and ideological conviction, with different individuals embodying these dynamics to varying degrees.

LLM