Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram’s studies on “Obedience to Authority”

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

Milgram’s experiments on obedience have made us more aware of the dangers of uncritically accepting authority.” (Peter Singer, New York Times Book Review)

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