Ethics

This Just In: People Still Suck

By Ed Brayton

A psychologist has redone the infamous Milgram experiment and found that a large majority of people will still continue to inflict pain on them at the order of an authority figure - even if they're shown an example of someone who refuses to do so.

Some things never change. Scientists said on Friday they had replicated an experiment in which people obediently delivered painful shocks to others if encouraged to do so by authority figures.

Seventy percent of volunteers continued to administer electrical shocks -- or at least they believed they were doing so -- even after an actor claimed they were painful, Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University in California found.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 27, 2008 (boomark / email).