What's Old is New

When I was a kid the generation raised in the 30s and 40s became the conformists of the 50s and 60s. But my generation, raised in the 50s and 60s, were supposedly rebels dancing to their beat. But Stanley Milgram created a famous experiment to show how the great majority of people are deeply conformist, to the point of torturing their fellow humans if the situation seemed to demand it.

This experiment has been redone with the kids of the Millennial Generation, and guess what? They are just as conformist as the kids of the 60s. Here's an article in The Mercury News by Lisa M. Krieger reporting that Jerry M. Burger, a psychologist at Santa Clara University, has replicated the results. Here's a snippet. The whole article is worth reading. And if you want to have have an in-depth understanding of this phenomenon, then read The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo:

Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks.

More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person's cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist.

"In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways,'' said Burger.

The study, using paid volunteers from the South Bay, is similar to the famous 1974 "obedience study'' by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the wake of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann's trial, Milgram was troubled by the willingness of people to obey authorities — even if it conflicted with their own conscience.