Long time ago, when I was in school I read about an experiment that changed my view of humankind. It was an experiment that tried to answer some provocative questions, with my failing memory I had forgotten the details, thank-you Primetime for delving into the subject, one that is very relevant for our times. Especially, since many of us like to get all self-righteous. The questions the experiment was trying to answer was do people have to be evil to do evil things?
Most of us have struggled to understand how seemingly ordinary people can sometimes do morally questionable things.
Two years ago, the photos of young American soldiers smiling while torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib horrified the world and raised the question of who was to blame.
Some of the soldiers defended themselves by claiming they were just doing what their superiors had instructed. But the smiling faces in the photos seemed to imply that they followed the orders without protest.
Are those soldiers inherently bad people? Or is it more complex than that? Do you have to be an evil person to do evil things?
In 1961, social psychologist Stanley Milgram asked those same questions. That was the year Nazi Adolf Eichmann, on trial for his war crimes, denied responsibility for his actions by saying he was simply doing what his superiors told him to do.
The experiment also tested the role and influence of "authority" figures in our lives.
At Yale university, Milgram asked a group of college students to participate in an experiment where some students were asked by a "man in a white lab coat" to deliver stronger and stronger electrical shocks to fellow students. The results surprised the world, and successfully limited psychological experiments on students for decades.
Although no one was actually receiving shocks, the participants heard a man screaming in pain and protest, eventually pleading to be released from the experiment. When the subjects questioned the experimenter about what was happening, they were told they must continue.
And continue they did: Two-thirds of Milgram's participants delivered shocks as they heard cries of pain, signs of heart trouble, and then finally — and most frightening — nothing at all.
General consensus has been that, that was then, and this is now. People rebel against authority figures all the time now....we are individualists...liberals. It is the time of independence and free thinking, it could never happen again!!
Well, Primetime with special permission from American Psychological Association (testing protocol), and Santa Clara University decided it was time find out:
In ABC News' version of the Milgram experiment, we tested 18 men, and found that 65 percent of them agreed to administer increasingly painful electric shocks when ordered by an authority figure.
The whole article is worth reading, but what is really scary was watching the participants continue shocking other people even when the person being shocked asked them to stop. These were ordinary people, no different than most of us.
Would you have stopped? It really doesn't matter, what matters is that most of us would not have.
SO what is the moral of the story? People in leadership/authority positions have much more power than we consciously realize. Therefore, they must be held accountable. Some of us run along the ground never looking up. The people we choose to place in positions of power can easily take us off a cliff. Beware.
http://abcnews.go.com/...