Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual ... acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.
Psychologists
Stanley Milgram
American social psychologist (1933-1984) who, prompted by the Holocaust and the Eichmann trial, conducted the Yale obedience experiments beginning in 1961. His finding that roughly two-thirds of ordinary subjects would follow orders to deliver what they believed were dangerous electric shocks reshaped the social-psychological account of authority, conformity and moral responsibility. He also designed the 1967 small-world experiment that gave rise to the popular idea of six degrees of separation, the lost-letter technique and the late-career cyranoid studies. His work remains canonical and contested in equal measure, central to ongoing debates about research ethics and the replicability of classic social psychology.
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Stanley Milgram's Other Quotes
The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions.
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe.
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