By Yosef Brody
Truthout | Op-Ed Sunday, 29 September 2013
Fifty years ago this month, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram published a groundbreaking article describing
a unique human behavior experiment. The study and its many variations,
while ethically controversial, gave us new insight into human tendencies
to obey authority, surprising the experts and everyone else on just how
susceptible we are to doing the bidding of others. The original
experiment revealed that a majority of participants would dutifully
administer increasingly severe electric shocks to strangers - up to and
including potentially lethal doses - because an authority told them that
pulling the levers was necessary and required (the "shocks," subjects
found out later, were fake). People who obeyed all the way to the end
did so even as they experienced tremendous moral conflict. Despite their
distress, they never questioned the basic premise of the situation that
was fed to them: the institution needed their compliance for the
betterment of the common good.
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