Authority and Obedience
These are two classic experiments in human behavior that everyone should learn about. As children we learn to do (and believe) as we’re told. But to become mature adults, we need to learn to recognize, survive, and constructively reform situations susceptible to rankism and learned helplessness.
The Milgram Obedience Experiment
One of Stanley Milgram’s basic contributions was, you don’t ask people what they would do given this hypothetical situation, you put them in the situation…
— former “Teacher” in Milgram’s Experiment
Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Study
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7803208099178869946
50 minutes
Anybody can be a guard. It’s harder to be on guard against the impulse to be sadistic, because it’s a quiet rage— a malevolence that you can dam up, but there’s nowhere for it to go…
—Former “Prisoner” in the Stanford Prison Experiment






February 26th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Thank you for looking at these experiments in the light of rankism. You might also be interested in the works of Czeslaw Milosz.