One of the most dramatic events in the immediate aftermath of World War II was
the series of Nuremburg Trials for the Nazi atrocities during the war, held in the German
city by that name. The trials lasted almost as long as the war itself and much of civilized
society was appalled as one Nazi defendant after another disclaimed any personal
responsibility for their actions because they all claimed merely to be "following orders."
The crimes that they perpetrated were so heinous and brutal that many concluded that the
Nazi regime was run by a collection of society's worst sociopaths most of whom would
likely have committed equally savage crimes under ordinary circumstances.
Hardly more than two decades later, two landmark psychology experiments were
conducted by Stanley Milgram – who examined the phenomenon of obedience to
authority – and by Phillip Zimbardo – who examined the potential for abuse of authority
in his famous Stanford Prison experiment. The results of those two experiments caused
the psychological community to reevaluate conclusions about what was responsible for
the blind obedience to authority and spontaneous cruelty perpetrated in Nazi Germany
Stanley Milgram – Obedience to Authority:
The experiment designed by Milgram used subjects who were unaware that they
were the subjects of the experiment; they were given roles of "teachers" in a supposed
memory experiment, in conjunction with which they were instructed by an authoritative
figure in a white lab coat to administer what the subjects believed were electric shocks to
the sham "learners" who were actually complicit in the experiment and not really
connected to any electric apparatus.
The real purpose of the experiment was to observe the extent to which ordinary
people would administer painful elect
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