When people discover that I am a criminologist, the most common question they ask is: ‘Why do people do such awful things to each other?’ They normally back this up with a reference to whichever dreadful crime has most recently been exercising both the press and the nation’s collective psyche. Inevitably I have to edit my reply, depending on who has asked the question and where we are talking. But if I have time, and my questioner is genuinely interested, I talk about Stanley Milgram.
Milgram was a psychologist who worked at Yale University in the early 1960s. He became famous for his experiments in which good, honest, everyday people apparently gave a complete stranger lethal electric shocks. Ordinary men and women — in this case, citizens of New Haven, Connecticut — were quite willing to give apparently deadly shocks of up to 450 volts to a pitifully protesting victim because an authoritative scientist stood close by commanding them to do so. In reality, the victim was an actor and was not harmed in the least, but Milgram had demonstrated that people, in the right circumstances, could indeed do awful things to their fellow human beings.
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