A new introduction to the reprinting of the original article from HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES in 1990 in IDEA- A Journal of Social Issues in 2004

We acknowledge with much appreciation the permission given by the editors of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and its publisher, Oxford University Press, to republish this article as it appeared originally in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1990, 5 (3), 313-335. We are also very grateful to the editor of IDEA, A Journal of Social Issues for recognizing that this study is deserving of republication and further dissemination to a much wider audience in the electronic media.

The significance of this research lies not only in its specific empirical findings which showed that “even” Jewish-Israelis -- the more so that they were students in the health professions of medicine, psychology and social work -- also produced a notable number of subjects who were ready to do serious harm to patients in our fictional scenarios; but in the further confirmation of what we shall call “the Milgram principle” that instructs us that disastrously large numbers of our human species are psychologically inclined to be very inhuman to others.

The actual results of our experimental scenarios showed that 38-39% of students of helping professions agreed to curtail treatment for the severely mentally ill and mentally retarded under conditions of limited medical resources; a smaller but still disturbing percentage of students (12-17%) agreed to plan so-called euthanasia for the patients; and about 10% of the students (9-11%) themselves agreed to be the professionals who would carry out with their own hands ”the mercy treatment to the most severely handicapped to end their continuing suffering” (p. 320). See Table 1 for a summary of the experimental scenarios.

The reader is also directed to two additional publications which resulted from this overall research:

I.W. Charny, and D. Fromer, ‘The Readiness of Health Profession Students to Comply with a Hypothetical Program of "Forced Migration" of a Minority Population’, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 4 (1) (1990), 486-495.

I.W. Charny, ‘To Commit or Not Commit to Human Life: Children of Victims and Victimizers – All’, Contemporary Family Therapy, 12 (5) (1990), 407-426.

It will be of further interest to readers that although the research was described in several reports in the Israeli press at the time, there was also unusual resistance to reporting the study. In one instance, the writer for the Jerusalem Post who specialized in Holocaust issues sat for several hours with the two experimenters, was obviously very interested in the study and tracked its results in great detail and depth, but then failed to publish a single word about the study. When we called to ask what happened, the reporter was guarded and noncommittal, and we could only assume that his editors didn’t want to report our troubling results. With respect to publication in a professional journal in Israel, for all that the study was so well reported in American and English journals, it never appeared in Hebrew. We submitted it to a psychotherapy-social science journal (Sichot), and indeed the journal at first accepted the article for publication. But as time passed and we saw that the study was not appearing, we contacted the editors only to learn that they had decided to cancel their acceptance of the article after receiving another critique in which the reviewer -- obviously a Hebrew-speaking Israeli colleague -- concluded that the results we reported were either a “forgery or a fabrication”! Nothing less: No question or doubts, the results simply couldn’t be. Moreover, the journal then refused to discuss the matter.

Whether personally or collectively, we human beings have a hard time facing truths about our propensity for evil. So that we think the larger meaning of the republication of this study in IDEA is the recognition that we need to do much more to face our inhuman human selves.