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Neuroscientists Detail How Humans Are Able To Hurt Others When Given Orders (universityherald.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the it-wasnt-me dept.

Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities? A team of neuroscientists studied just that, following the Milgram experiment conducted in the 1960s. Published in the journal Current Biology, this new study explains that "some basic feeling of responsibility really is reduced when we are coerced into doing something." The results indicate that humans are able to hurt each other when given orders.

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Ever wonder how seemingly normal people... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities?

    They were just trying to make Germany great again.

    1. Re:Ever wonder how seemingly normal people... by tnk1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities?

      They were just trying to make Germany great again.

      Actually, for many, this sort of hits it right on the head. The "Backstab" legend and the targeting of communists and other groups perceived to be fifth columnists like Jews, was a major popular idea about how Germany lost a war that they seemed to not be losing in 1918. Having gone from the military power that flattened France and Austria-Hungary a few decades past, to a power that somehow lost the war without it reaching German soil was incomprehensible to the German population and the people involved in the German Armed Forces in particular.

      (In defense of the people who didn't like communists, the Communists actually were trying to take over after the war, although it is hard to say who were the bigger assholes: the Communists or the Freikorps.)

      So there is a parallel, although I'd point out that the US may not be perfect right now, but we're still the world's lone superpower, so it's not like we're not currently "great". Embattled, yes, but in the same place as Weimar Germany? Absolutely not.

      Of course, facts don't always matter as much as they should. If you could somehow convince Americans, despite the evidence, that we are not great, and that we should be great again, you could generate a movement like this again.

  2. Nazis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why are the examples always nazis? How about "Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become communists and commit such atrocities?" The communists killed far more than nazis.