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Why do people obey? In Nazi Germany from 1933 to1945 millions of innocent people were systematically put to death. Adolf Hitler may have been a psychopathic monster but what about all the people that ran the day-to-day murders? Hannah Arendt (1963) covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a nazi war criminal who was found guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. She described him as a dull ordinary man and several psychiatrists found him quite sane. Eichmann's defence was he was only following orders. In her book the Banality Of Evil, Arendt said "the most ordinary people can become a criminal" This is not an easy conclusion to accept because it is more comforting to believe that monstrous deeds are committed by monstrous people. So why do ordinary people obey orders that are so obviously morally wrong? The issue of obedience to authority was explored by Stanley Milgram (1963,1974) in a...

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