Obedience & Resistance to Authority

Is the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority out-of-date or does it still have an important message for today?

• Why did American soldiers torture Iraqi prisoners in humiliating ways at Abu Ghraib?
• How could the country that brought us Bach and Beethoven kill millions of innocent people? Could it happen here or is it just part of the ugliness of war?
• Was the McDonald’s hoax, in which a man impersonating a police officer convinced managers to strip search innocent employees, just a horrible fluke?

Our new course argues that these events are not flukes, that they don’t just happen in wartime, and that Milgram’s findings four decades ago are just as relevant today as then.