Obedience

Throughout the semester, the topic I have found most interesting is Social Psychology, more specifically the Milgram study of obedience. I remember hearing about this study when I was younger and always being fascinated by it. The fascination arises from the fact that truly good-hearted people have the power to do nasty, cruel things under the orders of an authority figure. In the study, people are subject to an experiment where one of them is the "learner" and the other is the "teacher". Unbeknownst to the participant, the "learner" is really a confederate. The teacher then must administer a word association task with the learner, and whenever they get an answer wrong, they receive an electrical shock. The shock increases with each wrong answer. This is a frightening thing to think about, especially in the context of obedience of soldiers during the Holocaust or other genocides. It is truly amazing and horrifying how willing people are to comply with certain tasks without asking for any evidence of validity of the authority figure. Although the Milgram study can help explain why people thoughtlessly murder others, like in genocide, it should by no means be an excuse for it. The reason that most people comply with requests that they normally would never fulfill could possibly be a selfish reason. People are afraid that if they don't agree to do a certain unethical task, something worse will happen to them.
Here is a video where a man asked people to help him catch a woman who is a "kidnapper". Some people go as far as to steal the baby from the woman in order to help the man.