ABSTRACT
Stanley Milgram demonstrated the extent to which people obey authorities even when the commanded actions conflict with their personal morals. For Milgram, the massacre of 347 civilians by American soldiers in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War was another example of people's tendency to obey authority even when ordered to carry out awful acts. Milgram wrote Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, and designed the experiments described in the book, to try to understand the political and historical events that had taken place in Europe during World War II —then only two decades earlier. Milgram created a laboratory model for obedience and the hierarchy of social roles. Building on accounts given by the social psychologists that came before him, he made a useful contribution to explanations for the murderous acts that Germans carried out against their fellow citizens. The most important factor in Milgram's achievement was the ingenious design of his experiments.
