If a man in a white coat told you to give a painful electric shock to an innocent person, would you do it?

 

 

In 1961, scientists in the USA conducted experiments to measure obedience to authority in an attempt to understand the actions of the German people under Nazi rule.  

They predicted that almost everybody in the States would refuse to obey orders to inflict pain on an unseen victim and they were deeply shocked to discover that more than 62% of the American participants happily obliged, writes Geraldine Royds.

The experiments were designed by Professor Stanley Milgram at Yale University to see how far subjects would go in obeying an authority figure who ordered them to act against their personal conscience.

“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,’ concluded Professor Milgram .

In his 1974 paper, ‘The Perils of Obedience’, he adds ‘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’

Joseph Dimow was one of the few participants who did resist. In this interview for Jewish Currents he explains why.