One of my goals that developed for this blog was to spread knowledge. Ignorance is an excuse that we turn to very easily when mistakes happen. I want to present to you, my fellow readers, an interesting experiment that was done in the 1960's by Professor Milgram. He was conducting an experiment on authority. How far would an individual go to obey an authority figure if it went against their personal conscience? As you watch this, it may be easy for you to say, "oh, I'd stop" but shockingly about 60 - 65% continued to do so.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
What does this show? Why is this important? This study has been used to compare to the infamous Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. Soldiers took their power and the lack of responsibility a little to far when they were asked by the higher ups to get any information possible. Even if it meant they would be doing this to innocent civilians. Of course, another way to look at this would be not when it comes to physically hurting people directly, but indirectly. The Enron scandal comes to mind where people continued to lie about numbers, following the orders from their authority figure because they thought the blame would be shifted to them.
Thank you for reading.
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous then a sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
-Martin Luther King Jr
