The
perils of obedience is the scariest thing I've read in a while. Experiments showed how participants would administer (seemingly) painful electric shocks to actors posing as co-participants.
The fluidity of people's morals in the face of the authority of the conductor of the experiment is amazing.
This style of experiment was banned and I can see why, but at the same time I'm glad that the expereiments were done and I think that we should take a lesson both from the facts that they exposed and also from the fact that we banned them. Presumably this was to protect people from situations where their moral stances would be subject to stress and possibly traumatic compromise.
Dated: 01/13/2005