ABSTRACT
Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social life as one can point to. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, and daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders. Many people were unable to realize their values in action and found them continuing in the experiment even though they disagreed with what they were doing. Some people treat systems of human origin as if they existed above and beyond any human agent, beyond the control of whim or human feeling. Time and again in the experiment people disvalued what they were doing but could not muster the inner resources to translate their values into action.
