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1/6 It's widely known that Stanley Milgram convinced ordinary volunteers to deliver what they thought were painful electric shocks to other people when they were told to do so by an experimenter in a lab coat as part of a “teaching” exercise. But contrary to popular belief...
2/6 Milgram’s main objective wasn’t to prove how readily people will obey authority, even to do things that seem appalling. Rather, he was interested in how obedience changes in response to modifications in the environment. As he put it:
3/6 "Often, it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.” To wit, will people still cause someone pain if they can hear him crying out? What if he’s in the same room with them?...
4/6 What if they have to force his hand onto the electrical device? More subjects refused to carry out instructions with each of these iterations of the experiment. The less remote one’s victim, the less willing one is to make someone suffer, even if it means defying authority...
5/6 It's more difficult to dehumanize someone who is palpably, undeniably human. Which is why psychologist Nicholas Humphrey once proposed that arms control negotiators be required to talk to each other in the nude.
6/6 Finally, you may be interested in some background about another famous series of experiments whose actual findings (and purpose) were very different from what many people believe: Walter Mischel's "marshmallow studies": https://is.gd/HAN8s2
