1st post on Milgram Experiment (Derren Brown)

The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.

The experiments began in July 1961, three months after the start of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiments to answer this question: "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:
"The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' participants' strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' participants' ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority."

Above is a replica experiment done by Darren Brown in the UK. The results are strikingly similar to the results of the 1961 experiment by Milgram. This begs me to ask myself the question, "How far would I go in obeying authority despite my inner convictions?" For believers in Christ - our submission to earthly authority must be weighed and obeyed only to the extent that it affords our primary obedience to Christ, in my opinion... but this is not always a clear cut knowledge, and there are gray areas in most issues... this is when obeying the still small voice of the Holy Spirit in us is of dire importance. See video above...