In his 1963 study, The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram showed us that we can be far too obedient and often times not even realize it. The conclusions Milgram comes to and the conclusions that the readers are prompted to realize

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Compliant Tendencies

"If a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town (Milgram "The Perils of Obedience.")." In his 1963 study, The Perils of Obedience, Stanley Milgram showed us that we can be far too obedient and often times not even realize it. The conclusions Milgram comes to and the conclusions that the readers are prompted to realize on their own are disturbingly timeless and shocking, to say the least. Milgram's findings are also very general, as if over-obedience could be an ingrained, genetic aspect of human nature as well as a product of one's environment. In any event, these conclusions are immensely important when one is inclined to examine just exactly how we respond to terror and our leaders. Milgram demonstrated that the authoritarian, sadist personality is not just a social fringe, but rather is a dormant natural function of all humans in some way or another, especially when obedience becomes a factor (Milgram "The Perils of Obedience."). Close study of Milgram's entire article is highly recommended seeing as his insights apply today just as they did when he conducted his famous experiments. It is hard to imagine that astute politicians have not taken advantage of our compliant tendencies to want to please, especially as we go to war or vote. That at least seems to be how we elected a great campaigner who could not lead or even govern with everyone's interest at heart. Appearance of command is all that seems to matter in the end. American politics has for some decades now, embraced form ahead of substance, all because of the labor structure and lack of complete responsibility when obeying orders that Milgram alluded to.
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Milgram's experiments first took place at Yale University and eventually involved over one thousand participants at several other universities. Two individuals were to enter a psychology laboratory and take part in a study of memory and learning. One of them was to be the teacher and the other one the student. This student was instructed to learn a list of word pairs. If the learner failed to remember the word pairs, he would receive electric shocks of increasing intensity until he had gotten all of the answers correct (Milgram "The Perils of Obedience.").

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