the voice in the box

The Milgram Obedience Experiments

Sixty-five percent of ordinary people, when instructed by an authority figure, administered what they believed to be a 450-volt electric shock to a stranger who had stopped responding. They were not sadists. They were not broken. They were people inside a structure that had distributed the moral weight of the action until it felt bearable. This is the finding. It has never been comfortably explained away.