ABSTRACT
Stanley Milgram's work has contributed substantially to Holocaust scholarship, and has been adapted by other specialties- to enable soldiers to question illegal orders, for example, and to help business people to reject illegal activities. Milgram's work built on the ideas of the German American psychologist Kurt Lewin, who argued that an individual's behavior always stems from both their personality and the situation in which they find themselves. Stanley Milgram's results in Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View has found numerous practical uses. For instance, business schools have added ethics courses, and business firms are now more likely to urge independent thinking among employees. While Milgram suggests that "obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose", others are skeptical of applying this claim to extreme situations like the Holocaust. Milgram demonstrated that the interaction between the social context created in his laboratory and the personality of the individual resulted in either obedience or disobedience to authority.
