The Perils of Obedience

[HysteryDiagnosis]

I looked this up, Bill Shatner played in a made for TV version of this experiment... what brought it to mind was the strip search video posted earlier. This is something everyone should be made aware of, especially the agents of the law involved in this strip search. The Wiki has much more on this and is worth a long visit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Milgram experiment was a series of seminal social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,<1> and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.<2>

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"<3>

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

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' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' 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.<4>



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment


The experimenter (E) orders the Teacher (T) to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L),(who is actually an actor and confederate/stooge). The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. After being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.<1>