Paradigm Assumptions About Moral Behavior: An Empirical Battle Royal

The horrors of the Second World War blindsided social scientists, as it did most everyone else on the planet. With over 60 million casualties, the use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations, and especially the Holocaust—all carried out by modern nations—the social sciences were vastly underequipped to explain, let alone suggest prophylaxes for, such atrocities. World War II demanded (and still demands) a credible psychological explanation and a lesson learned to prevent repeat. In response, social scientists grappled with the challenge of explaining both heinous behavior in the perpetration of evil (of the likes of Hitler and Eichmann) and heroic behavior in the defiance of authority (of the likes of Schindler and Bonhoeffer). Dispositional and situational explanations came to the fore. From a dispositionalist perspective, personality psychologists (such as Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) advanced the notion of the authoritarian personality, which explained people’s frequent complicity in the callous agendas of authoritarian regimes. In a somewhat similar vein, developmental psychologists (such as Kohlberg, 1964) advanced the possibility that immature forms of moral reasoning explained these complicit behaviors, with developmentally advanced individuals more likely to challenge the dictates of authorities whos