Christopher L. Schilling is the author of The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility and The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia. Instead of hoping for the field of psychology to one day solve the problem of antisemitism and how to punish it, he proposes we ask ourselves how much it has not helped but rather harmed the fight against antisemitism.
Seven years before Rabbi Moshe Sebbag of the Grand Synagogue of Paris advised young Jews in 2024 to leave the country because ‘it seems France has no future for Jews’, a man entered the apartment of Sarah Halimi in Paris. There he tortured the Orthodox Jew, while chanting verses from the Koran and shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and antisemitic slurs, before throwing her tortured but still living body out of the window of her third-story apartment. She was 65 years old. Citing Article 122 of the French Penal Code, judges later declared the murderer not criminally responsible based on an independent psychiatric analysis. It was found that he was undergoing a ‘psychotic episode’ because of cannabis consumption even though the court concluded that the killer’s motivation to murder Sarah Halimi was the fact that she was Jewish. ‘The crime was the crime of a madman,’ wrote five of the psychiatric experts in the newspaper Le Monde, ‘And in France we do not judge the mad.’ Outrageous injustices as such are the outcome when psychology is presented as the explanation for human behaviour – as if the murderer had no choice but to kill her, and life is one huge Stanford prison experiment.
Yet Philip Zimbardo’s world-famous Stanford Prison Experiment – which pretended to demonstrate the power of situation over human behaviour – was flawed. Via transcripts of tapes of Zimbardo, it was uncovered that he was ‘intervening directly in the experiment, giving his ‘guards’ very precise instructions on how to behave – going as far as to suggest specific ways of dehumanising the prisoners, like denying them the use of toilets.’ Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist at King’s College London, thus, called the Stanford Prison Experiment a ‘heavily stage-managed production’ and ‘scientifically meaningless.’
The field of social psychology has long enjoyed a storied reputation. It offered captivating theories and neat explanations for the myriad quirks of human behaviour. Yet today, this once-vaunted discipline finds itself mired in a profound crisis, one that calls into question not just individual studies but the very foundation upon which the field is built. This crisis has significant implications for understanding complex social issues, including antisemitism, which remains disturbingly prevalent in contemporary society, and badly misunderstood in academia.
The rumblings began decades ago. Efforts to reform social psychology in the late 1960s were insufficient, leaving the field vulnerable. By 2010, cracks in the edifice had become too prominent to ignore. A growing number of celebrated studies were revealed to be either fundamentally flawed or outright false, undermining confidence in the field’s conclusions.
The first major lightning bolt struck in 2010 with Daryl Bem’s infamous study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bem, a psychologist at Cornell University, claimed that humans could perceive future events. Critics quickly highlighted significant flaws in both design and statistical analysis. Another major pillar of social psychology’s credibility collapsed under scrutiny in the years that followed. John Bargh’s 1996 study on behavioral priming suggested that reading about elderly people could make individuals walk more slowly. Cited over 6,300 times, Bargh’s findings were widely accepted—until replication attempts consistently failed. In his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, the Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote about priming: ‘Disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.’ Just a year later, he warned in an open letter that despite him being a ‘general believer’ in priming, ‘a train wreck’ was approaching the concept.
Another scandal erupted with the case of Diederik Stapel, a prominent social psychologist. Stapel’s world crumbled in 2011 when it was revealed that he had fabricated data in at least 58 publications, leading to their retraction. The New York Times called him ‘perhaps the biggest con man in academic science.’ Stapel’s downfall wasn’t just a personal tragedy; it was a catastrophe for the entire field. ‘It’s likely,’ wrote the Chronicle of Higher Education in regard to social psychology, ‘that many, perhaps most, of the studies published in the past couple of decades are flawed.’ And ‘If you’re a psychologist who has built a career on what may turn out to be a mirage, it’s genuinely terrifying.’
However, unverifiable findings from social psychology are still widely being used by scholars to explain antisemitism. This occurs most often with the work of Stanley Milgram, one of the most important figures in social psychology and famous for his experiments on obedience. Glenn Geher, professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, stated, and quite wrongfully so: ‘Stanley Milgram, another American Jew, showed that any regular Joe is capable of obeying an authority figure to the point of being able to kill an innocent other.’ This is simply not true. Science writer Gina Perry has – to much international acclaim – investigated Milgram’s data in her book Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. She suggests that Milgram had manipulated his results and that there was a ‘troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired,’ since ‘only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66 per cent disobeyed the experimenter.’
Often social psychologists refer instead to the lack of self-esteem regarding antisemitism which is entirely unconvincing to suggest as such. Antisemites do not show low levels of self-esteem. In fact, criminals have been found to have generally higher levels of self-esteem. Rusi Jaspal, who is board member of various academic journals including the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and Israel Affairs, is an example of this school of thought. His open access article ‘The social psychology of contemporary antisemitism’ has thousands of views online and likely to shape people’s perception, despite the field of social psychology being largely unhelpful.
A year before the enormous outbreak of antisemitism across America after 7 October, Rabbi David Wolpe (the 2012 ‘most influential Rabbi in America’) delivered a talk at the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (ISCA) at Indiana University on the ‘Psychology of the Antisemite’ that didn’t age particularly well:
‘I don’t want to be a thorough going alarmist. I do believe that things can change, and they can change for the better as they can change for the worse. My general read of the contemporary situation is in America we have to just be constantly aware and speak out. Do I see an impending apocalypse? No, I don’t. And I think those who do, are doing America and their fellow Americans a real disservice.’
Wolpe later joined America’s worst college for free speech and top for campus antisemitism, Harvard, where he called Claudine Gay ‘both a kind and thoughtful person’. That was after her infamous testimony before Congress. Antisemitism would be a ‘disease’ and ‘recurrent virus’, so Wolpe in his ISCA talk. This is clearly not the case, otherwise antisemites are in need to heal from their suffering and anyone catching the virus would be a victim. Alvin Rosenfeld, who hosted the talk, called it himself a ‘social disease’ and introduced Wolpe as among ‘the most accomplished scholars of antisemitism of this generation’.
Another ISCA talk was Rusi Jaspal’s ‘The Changing Face of Antisemitism: Insights from Social Psychology’ which was based on theories that would ‘add further depth’ to the field such as Terror Management Theory. Yet those claims can’t be replicated. In fact, a study published in 2019 (and announced in 2017) by over 30 established scholars has convincingly shown this. Jaspal’s ISCA talk was three years later. He also relied in his talk on Florette Cohen Abady’s ideas on death anxiety, which makes the outrageous claim that ‘antisemitism is, in part, a defense aimed at repressing death related anxieties.’ This would mean that antisemites are victims who need help because they suffer from anxiety. Her call for papers on ‘the psychology of antisemitism’ was later posted by the London Centre for Contemporary Antisemitism.
In the aftermath of 7 October, NYU launched its Center for the Study of Antisemitism. ‘The announcement came the same day that NYU was hit with a lawsuit filed by three Jewish students alleging that the university allowed a hostile, discriminatory environment that violated their civil rights protections’, reported The Times of Israel. The Center intends to host scholars and students from diverse disciplines – including psychology. Also more than a quarter of the 2022 Fellows at the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research focus in their research on psychology, while the Journal for Contemporary Antisemitism could, based on its staff, almost be described as a psychology journal. I am not aware of any critical examination of the crisis in any journal focusing on antisemitism. A fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism (ISGAP) even called for more private and public funding of psychological research. However, psychologists could simply write down their best guesses instead of having them conduct any often expensive and taxpayer funded studies. After all, an analysis found that 91.5 percent of studies within psychology and psychiatry confirmed the researcher’s expected effects (about five times higher than in hard sciences). What is more is the problem of ideological conformity that exists in the field of psychology with an almost complete absence of conservative or moderate voices and a hostility to viewpoint diversity.
The replication crisis was a huge red flag. Academia ignored it. At least overwhelmingly so judged by the sheer amount of social psychology degrees still being awarded and its holders seen as authorities. The truth is the crisis was just as much an embarrassment for psychology as it was for antisemitism studies. It meant that one of its foundations was falling apart. The moment this became clear, and the field acted like it never happened, it became, in no way unimportant in its goal, but somehow meaningless.
The ramifications of this crisis extend far beyond academic circles. Social psychology’s ideas often influence public policy and societal attitudes, making the field’s credibility crucial. The ongoing replication crisis highlights the need for rigorous scientific practices and greater transparency in research. False findings not only mislead other researchers but also misinform the public and policymakers, leading to misguided decisions with real-world impacts. In May 2023, Biden’s White House issued the ‘U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism‘ and wrote under ‘Executive Branch Actions’ to reach out to the scientific research community and to encourage research on hate including those on social psychology. This is deeply troubling. Perpetrators could be freed of any responsibility for their evil acts while justified actions – including antisemitism studies itself – could be discredited as insane. During the U.S. Civil Rights Movement black men, for instance, were discredited as ‘schizophrenic’, while labelling political or religious dissidents ‘insane’ is a common practise in dictatorships, too. Numerous examples of the systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union speak to this. It has, in fact, been estimated that about one-third of the political prisoners in the Soviet Union were imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals during the 1970s and 1980s.
Contemporary academia is generally underestimating the complexity of the world. The early successes of hard sciences led us to mistakenly believe that the world is as straightforward as it is within the laboratory. The psychological understanding of antisemitism is, at best, an oversimplification that underestimates the complexity of human life. In doing so, psychologists replace justice with empathy, and a false one at that.
