Obedience to Authority - the Root of All Evil?

If there were ever a time for a discussion on creepy experiments, today is the day!

Last night there was a show on the Discovery channel titled "How Evil Are You?"  It reproduced an experiment that was originally performed 50 years ago by Stanley Milgram of Yale University.  I found it much more fascinating to understand the experiment in black and white from the early sixties than watch the new show, although that is what sparked my interest.

The Milgram Experiment was created to explain some of the concentration camp-horrors of the World War 2, where Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and other enemies of the state were slaughtered by Nazis. Many war-criminals claimed they were merely following orders and could not be held responsible for their actions in the trials following the World War 2.  Were the Germans in fact evil and cold-hearted, or is this a group phenomenon which could happen to anyone, given the right conditions?

The Milgram Experiment set up a fake shock generator which gave electric shock, given by the tester, to another participant, the learner, in increments of 15 to 450 volts.  Each time the learner gave an incorrect test answer, he would receive a shock.  The tester giving the shock was in a separate room; the tester and learner had met, but were not in the same area.  Everyone but the tester was in on the test; the learner was not receiving shock treatment.  An overseer, referred to as the "experimenter" was in the room giving directions as needed, such as "Go on", "You must continue", that sort of thing.  The question was “For how long will someone continue to give shocks to another person if they are told to do so, even if they thought they could be seriously hurt?”

Throughout the experiment, dependent upon the number of volts given, the tester would hear cries of discomfort, then anguish, then silence.  Although most subjects were uncomfortable doing it, all 40 subjects in the test obeyed up to 300 volts, 25 of the 40 subjects continued to give shocks until the maximum level of 450 volts was reached.

 Before the Stanley Milgram Experiment, experts thought that about 1-3 % of the subjects would not stop giving shocks. They thought that you’d have to be pathological or a psychopath to do so. Still, 65 % never stopped giving shocks. None stopped when the learner said he had heart-trouble.  How could that be? We now believe that it has to do with our almost innate behavior that we should do as told, especially from authority persons.

Creepy huh?  Perhaps this is a reminder that all authority is not good authority and we must respect the minds we possess and have the strength to do what is right, not simply follow direction.