Experimenter (2015)Now, how often have we seen seemingly good people doing incomprehensibly evil deeds which are atypical of their general behaviour and predisposition? Too many times, middle management officers had been cruel beyond comprehension just because they were given the authority to do so. Even though, these junior officials know it is wrong to do certain things, they still do it as long as somebody else is taking charge. This phenomenon of blind obedience to authority was a favourite subject of Dr Stanley Milgram, a Jewish psychologist whose relatives perished in Hitler's concentration camps.
The question of the Holocaust and the justification for the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg trial must have been close to his heart.
Around the time of Eichmann trial, in 1962, in Yale, Milgram performed an ingenious social experiment (see Youtube clip below) which was later condemned as unethical, for invoking emotional stress is some participants, to show that most people would perform immoral things if ordered to do so by an authoritative figure. Not many would stand up against the majority to fight for what he feels is just. He went on to show this in other planned experiments. We are followers and can be easily triggered to go into an agentic state where we behave like an agent of the people in authority without taking any responsibility for the consequence of our actions. We blindly follow the order of someone in authority.
Many of his social experiments made it to the telly as seen in 'Candid Camera' series. The movie ends by saying that we are just puppets but with perception and awareness. Perhaps we can achieve liberation if we are aware of the strings that tie us down!
Good people do bad things through omission, coercion, with the desire to conform to society and not rock the boat!
