Coercion - It's easy to be bad

Do people feel a sense of responsibility when they're told to do something bad?
25 February 2016
Presented byKat Arney.

Back in the 1960s, US researcher Stanley Milgram stunned the world with a study showing that members of the public were prepared to inflict potentially lethal electric shocks on supposedly innocent volunteers, if a lab-coated scientist ordered them to do so. In fact the recipients of the shocks were actually actors, who escaped unharmed. Milgram's experiments raised many ethical questions - not least about whether it was right to do them at all - and Patrick Haggard from UCL is now trying to find out to what extent people feel a sense of responsibility or control when they're ordered to do something nasty to someone else. He told Kat Arney about his latest shocking experiments.

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