13 hours ago
Was it science, or performance art?
After the horrors of the Holocaust and World War 2, the field of social psychology was dominated by a need to understand what made ordinary people become monsters and allow themselves to be hypnotised by the murderous directives of maniacal psychopathic leaders. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram, a Yale University professor influenced by the revelations of the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichman, conducted a controversial experiment to show how far those taking orders would go in service of the directives of their superiors. Subjects assigned the role of teachers to invisible students were ordered to administer increasingly dangerous levels of electric shocks and, despite some qualms, nearly all did as they were told. Milgram's work was later used to explain the horrific events of the Mai Lai massacre, which took place during the Vietnam War in 1968, and saw US soldiers massacre unarmed women and children in a South Vietnamese village...
