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“Power of the Situation” touches on self-discovery and our responses to the situations that are happening around us. It takes a close look at the Milgram Experiment, which is a study on how a person reacts to authority figures.

The experiment was conducted in the early 60′s at Yale University and involved participants who had to follow a figure of authority, despite the fact that what they are doing is against their own convictions.

The experiment takes into account the time of the Holocaust to better understand the response of man, and assumes that while not everyone agreed with the way the prisoners were being treated, every soldier at that time was merely following orders. What makes a dictator so powerful, that his constituents cannot do anything but follow his every command?

Dr. Stanley Milgram had this to say about his ideas:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. 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.”

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