A bunch of self-described artists
are presenting a re-enactment of Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiment.
Milgram’s is possibly the most famous single experiment in the history of Psychology and regardless of critiques of the experimental protocols, methods, conclusions and so on it remains still as a chilling and unguessable insight into our penchant for doing what we’re told. Two-thirds of people were prepared to kill in the course of an experiment if they were told to do so by a gent in a white coat.
Fantastic experiment it is and there’s film of it, too, of actors taking the part of supposed experimental subjects crying out in agony and then falling silent as the real experimental subjects threw the switch to electrocute them.
What on earth a group of people who call themselves artists think they’re contributing by acting out Milram’s experiment I can’t imagine. They don’t just call themselves actors, mind you and they don’t claim to be a theatre company - one could just about grasp the point of that. Oh no. They’re artists. It’s a project by an artist! Give me strength and give me Milgram over these pseuds any day.
Milgram - who, through another innovative exeriment was also the originator of the six degrees of separation
meme - died too young. He once said:
…stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
