In the early 1960’s Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram
conducted an experiment that had subjects administering what they believed were
electric shocks to a third party at the behest of an authority figure in a lab
coat. It was ostensibly an attempt to discover if millions of people throughout
Europe who aided in committing the atrocities of the Holocaust could actually
have simply been following orders that conflicted with their own sense of
morality. What is a human’s natural response to a person in a authority and how
far would we go before standing up to such a person? Milgram’s findings, which
were later confirmed in further studies in different parts of the world, were
troubling and revealed a side of human nature that should make most people
uncomfortable. It turned out a large majority of the subjects were willing and
ready to cause bodily harm to another person because they were told to do so.
