Back in 1963, Stanley Milgram's experiments shone a cold hard light on ordinary people's willingness to inflict pain on other human beings when instructed to do so by a figure of authority. The experiments began just months after the beginning of the trail of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and were devised to answer the following question:
"Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?"
The results speak for themselves.
Since then, how many people -- myself among them -- have wondered how they would have behaved in such situations? Would we have stood by our consciences, or blindly obeyed our heinous orders.
However, shortly after Milgram's results were published, ethical guidelines for experimentation changed, rendering his studies impossible to replicate. Until recently.
Two years ago, funded by ABC, psychologist Jerry Burger found a way to replicate the experiment within current guidelines, and just recently his findings have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. His results: the same as Milgram's.
Click here for details, and ponder the bleak implications. Happy Friday.
