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Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to
violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he
loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different
focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he
performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of
how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of
him. In wartime, a soldier does not ask whether it is good or bad to
bomb a hamlet; he does not experience shame or guilty in the
destruction of a village: rather he feels pride or shame depending on
how well he has performed the mission assigned to him.

Another psychological force at work in this situation may be termed
"counteranthropomorphism." For decades psychologists have discussed
the primitive tendency among men to attribute to inanimate objects and
forces the qualities of the human species. A countervailing tendency,
however, is that of attributing an impersonal quality to forces that
are essentially human in origin and maintenance. Some people treat
systems of human origin as if they existed above and beyond any human
agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. The human element
behind agencies and institutions is denied. Thus, when the
experimenter says, "The experiment _requires_ that you continue," the
subject feels this to be an imperative that goes beyond any merely
human command. He does not ask the seemingly obvious question, "Whose
experiment? Why should the designer be served while the victim
suffers?" The wishes of a man -- the designer of the experiment --
have become part of a schema which exerts on the subject's mind a
force that transcends the personal. "It's _got_ to go on. It's _got_
to go on," repeated one subject. He failed to realize that a man like
himself wanted it to go on. For him the human agent had faded from the
picture, and "The Experiment" had acquired an impersonal momentum of
its own.