Obedience to Authority
If ordered to do so, would you comply with an experimenter’s instruction to give people increasingly painful electric shocks? Most people would say no; yet, the research of social psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963, 1975) suggests that most of us will obey such orders. In Milgram’s words (1975), “Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under order.”