Humans have a strong inclination to obey laws and social norms. This tendency — encouraged by parents, teachers, priests, employers — is far from being undesirable and plays a key role in maintaining order within social systems. Without obedience, in fact, any social organisation would be governed by chaos and people could not even hold a civil conversation.
There are various kinds of laws, rules and authority figures in the social worlds we inhabit and it is not always a good idea to respect them. To more fully understand this concept, let us turn to the results of one of the most famous and controversial social psychology studies: the Milgram obedience to authority experiment (Milgram 1963).
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