Posts Tagged ‘Milgram’
Checkmate in Three
or: How to hijack a bandwagon
“Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” – Exodus
Back in 1961, as the mild-looking, pen-pushing architect of the Holocaust Adolf Eichmann was on trial for genocide, Stanley Milgram began investigating the question of obedience. What he revealed is unsettling, but contains an element of hope for the free-thinking subversive.
The basic experiment begins with two subjects deciding by lot which would be the ‘teacher’ and which the ‘learner’. The teacher first watches the learner being strapped into a chair and covered with electrodes. Then the teacher is seated in an adjacent room at a machine labelled ‘Shock Generator’. A man in a white coat tells him to read questions to the learner through a microphone, and punish errors with increasing electric shocks. Read the rest of this entry »
