The Human Potential for Blind Obedience essays

The Human Potential for Blind Obedience essays 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 societys 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 ...