Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View

What is a good citizen capable of doing in obedience to an order? Thinking about the tens of thousands of people in Nazi Germany who sent their own kind to death, just doing their duty, prompted Stanley Milgram to think about a provocative experiment. The behavior of the subjects during different variations of the experiment invariably confirmed Milgram's terrible guesses: some participants in the tests severely "punished" others, not using their right to refuse. The paradox is that such virtues as loyalty, discipline and self-sacrifice, which we value so much in a person, bind people to the most inhuman systems of power. But since the days of the Nazi death camps, human nature has not changed. That is why the relevance of the concept, which the experiment confirms with terrible persuasiveness, can be disputed, but dangerously underestimated. The famous Milgram experiment, which at first aroused protest and distrust among many, was later recognized as one of the most morally significant studies in psychology.