Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.
Psychologists
Stanley Milgram
American social psychologist (1933-1984) who, prompted by the Holocaust and the Eichmann trial, conducted the Yale obedience experiments beginning in 1961. His finding that roughly two-thirds of ordinary subjects would follow orders to deliver what they believed were dangerous electric shocks reshaped the social-psychological account of authority, conformity and moral responsibility. He also designed the 1967 small-world experiment that gave rise to the popular idea of six degrees of separation, the lost-letter technique and the late-career cyranoid studies. His work remains canonical and contested in equal measure, central to ongoing debates about research ethics and the replicability of classic social psychology.
View this figure's profile
Stanley Milgram's Other Quotes
The essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer sees himself as responsible for his actions.
With numbing regularity good people were seen to knuckle under the demands of authority and perform actions that were callous and severe.
The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.
Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual ... acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders.
Related Quotes
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
-- Hannah Arendt
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
-- Hannah Arendt