Chapter 9 Further Reading

Primary Sources and Foundational Studies

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974) Milgram's own account of the research, written for a general audience. More nuanced than secondary summaries. He grapples honestly with the ethical problems of the research itself — participants were deceived and subjected to significant psychological stress — and with the implications. Chapters 1–5 are essential.

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) The original. Often misread. Part I establishes the factual context; Part III ("Judgment, Appeal, Execution") contains the most direct philosophical argument. Read before forming an opinion based on secondary accounts.

Haidt, Jonathan. "The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail" (Psychological Review, 2001) The paper that launched the social intuitionist model. Available online. More technical than the popular accounts but essential for understanding what Haidt actually claimed vs. what popularizers said he claimed.

Key Books

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012) The accessible, book-length treatment of both the social intuitionist model and moral foundations theory. Chapters 1–7 cover the dual-process moral psychology; Chapters 8–12 develop moral foundations theory and apply it to political polarization. Readable, well-argued, and productively controversial.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) The most thorough accessible treatment of dual-process theory. Not primarily about ethics, but the framework developed in Part I is foundational for understanding moral psychology. Read as background to Haidt.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) Young's original development of structural injustice theory. Parts I and II are most relevant to this chapter. The concept of the "five faces of oppression" (exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence) is one of the most useful analytical frameworks in contemporary political philosophy.

Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007) Zimbardo's own account of the Stanford Prison Experiment and situationism broadly. Read alongside the 2018 criticisms (below) for a complete picture. Zimbardo's situationist argument is valuable even if the specific experiment is weaker than he claims.

Critical and Corrective Readings

Le Texier, Thibault. "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment" (American Psychologist, 2019) The most thorough and carefully documented critique. Available online. Essential for anyone who plans to cite the SPE as philosophical evidence.

Blum, Ben. "The Lifespan of a Lie" (Medium/Gen, 2018) Accessible journalistic account of the same revelations. Easier to read than Le Texier's academic paper. Shows how the popular narrative of the SPE was shaped and maintained.

Oswald, Frederick, et al. "Predicting Ethnic and Racial Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of IAT Criterion Studies" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013) The critical meta-analysis of IAT predictive validity. Should be read alongside more recent responses by Greenwald and colleagues for a complete picture of where the field actually stands.

Manning, Rachel et al. "The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping" (American Psychologist, 2007) Corrects the myth with careful historical investigation. Demonstrates how a simplified narrative can distort both public understanding and scientific research programs.

Accessible Philosophy

Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (2013) Greene develops the dual-process account of morality into a constructive proposal: we should use deliberate reasoning to adjudicate between the moral tribes whose intuitive reactions conflict. More prescriptive than Haidt; useful as a counterweight. Chapter 2 on the trolley problem is excellent.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (2010) A fascinating account of how moral progress actually occurred in four historical cases — dueling, foot-binding, slavery, and women's honor. Appiah's answer broadly supports the moral imagination model rather than the pure-reasoning model of moral progress.

Flanagan, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism (1991) A philosopher's engagement with the empirical psychology of moral character. Argues that ethics must be psychologically realistic — must take seriously the kind of creatures we actually are — rather than building theories around idealized rational agents.

For Deeper Investigation

If the implicit bias and structural injustice debate interests you: 1. Young's Responsibility for Justice (2011) — her later, more refined treatment of political responsibility under structural conditions 2. Shelby, Tommie. Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (2016) — applies structural injustice analysis to American urban poverty with great philosophical rigor 3. Banaji, Mahzarin and Greenwald, Anthony. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (2013) — accessible treatment by the IAT's primary developers, with honest engagement with the research's limits

If the moral foundations and political psychology material interests you: 1. Graham, Jesse, Haidt, Jonathan, et al. "Mapping the Moral Domain" (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011) — the best academic paper on MFT methodology 2. Mounk, Yascha. The People vs. Democracy (2018) — uses related frameworks to analyze contemporary political polarization at the institutional level 3. Tetlock, Philip. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (2005) — important corrective to overconfidence in political moral certainty

Films and Documentaries

"The Act of Killing" (2012, dir. Oppenheimer) Indonesian death squad leaders reenact their killings from the 1960s. One of the most disturbing and philosophically important documentaries made, directly relevant to Arendt's banality of evil argument.

"Experimenter" (2015) A dramatization of Milgram's life and work. Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram. More philosophically thoughtful than most biopics; includes Milgram's own ambivalence about his research.

"I Am Not Your Negro" (2016) James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript on race in America, adapted as a documentary. One of the most powerful applications of moral imagination — Baldwin's capacity to make white Americans see their world from the outside — in any medium.