Understanding of the psychology of tyranny is dominated by classic studies from the 1960s and 1970s: Milgram's research on obedience to authority and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Supporting popular notions of the banality of evil, this research has been taken to show that people conform passively and unthinkingly to both the instructions and the roles that authorities provide, however...

This article questions the traditional reading of Pier Candido Decembrio's “Life Filippo Maria Visconti” (1447) as a tyrant narrative, first proposed by Jacob Burckhardt and highly influential ever since. An examination Milanese context relevant collateral documentation establishes unlikelihood that Decembrio wished to denounce his former master tyrant. Rather, avowed aim was spread prince's fa...

Research on the causes for vaccine resistance among Nigerian Muslims reveals what philosopher Žižek terms a “heaven in disorder:” lack of trust public institutions, conspiracy theories, ignorance basic science, individual apathy, and faith “Allah as only protector.” Other social contexts demonstrate far greater compliance. How can governments improve outcomes resistant communities amidst such c...

Picture this. It’s a true story. A twenty-nine-year-old woman enters a hospital emergency room with complaints of fever and cough. In the emergency room her fever is confirmed, she has a cursory exam and is sent for a chest X-ray that shows a left mid-lung infiltrate (see the X-ray above). A diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is made, and the patient is discharged on azithromycin. ...

Reicher and Haslam's (2006) BBC prison study undermines the idea that people passively accept and enact social roles. In this commentary, I point out that this idea is an example of Moscovici's (1976) conformity bias and a wider stability bias in social psychological theorizing. In many key areas, the science prefers analyses that explain how and why social structures, intergroup and power rela...