Too Easy To Pull the Lever.

Of the four studies we spoke about in class yesterday, the one which seemed most profound to me was the Milgram study. This was the study which sought to illustrate the willingness of an individual to follow through with the orders of an authority figure, even if their conscience would instruct them to do otherwise.

The individual in the experiment would be told they were assisting in a program that reinforces teaching by administering an electric shock to a student, each and every time the student made a mistake. With a board of shock switches in front of them, the individual would flip a switch based on the commands of an administrative adviser to the program. This would be the test of an individual's obedience to an authority figure.

What was so confounding to me was the fact that despite the apparent pain that the individual was inflicting upon the student, at times sounding excruciating, the individual, in nearly two thirds of the cases, would go all the way through the entire board of switches.

The seems to be a very clear illustration of how individual german citizens were able to comply with the atrocities commited in the holocaust, how every day citizens could do the unimaginable.