Milgrams Obedience Experiment

In the 1960s, Milgram, then a professor at Yale, recruited ordinary people through a newspaper ad offering them money to help in a project purporting to improve human memory. In Milgrams experiment two people come into the laboratory where they are told they will be taking part in a study of memory and learning. Milgram was interested in how people obey under authoritative circumstances, using "fake" settings to test obedience. Under any given circumstance people …

…inflicting harm on the other person. The purpose of the study was to determine the degree to which a person will be obedient to an authority's orders or requests if they do not agree with the requests being made. This situation occurs in many aspects of society, including the military, employer/employee situations, and most disturbingly, Nazi Germany. I think that this experiment shows just how sadistic one can be if one wishes to be.