This is an ABC podcast.

For as long as there have been humans, there has been reason to wonder, why do people do evil things?

Psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to find out the answer to that, and he had good reason.

One of the key things to know about him was that he was of Jewish descent.

His family, most of them, had fled Germany just prior to the Holocaust or to escape here.

But not all of them had.

Those who were left behind were mostly killed.

And the fact that many of his relatives had perished in the Holocaust provided a critical

impetus for his own research, which was to understand how it was possible that civilized,

decent, ordinary people might have perpetrated or come to perpetrate these acts of horrendous evil.

Stanley Milgram was especially interested in the idea of obedience.

As Nazi figures faced trial after World War II, many claimed they were simply following orders.

Milgram wanted to interrogate this. Could people really be led to do awful things just by being told to do them?

The banality of evil.

And the idea that when we do evil things, it's just a rather banal process of obedience and just coutowing to authority.

But the experiment he would devise to test this would become one of the most infamous examples

of unethical research in the field of psychology.

You're listening to All In the Mind, I'm Sana Khadar.

Not only was the Milgram Shock experiment unethical, but what it demonstrates about why people do evil things is also deeply misunderstood,

says University of Queensland psychology professor Alex Haslam.

So what you want people to believe is that this stuff is all thoughtless,

whereas actually it's anything but it requires intellectual and behavioral engagement.

...