The Millgram Experiment

The Millgram Experiment is a famous social psychological study conducted in the early 1960s in the shadow of the Holocaust. Designed to test obedience, it is widely understood to demonstrate that good people will sometimes do bad things if they are told to do so by someone in a position of authority. In Stanley Millgram's own words (according to the Wikipedia site):

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

-- "The Perils of Obedience" (1974)

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Thanks to Ang for noticing that this was on youtube!