It’s actually easy to force people to be evil

If the military forces you to destroy an alien species in space, your brain won't process it the same way it would if you chose to destroy the aliens of your own free will. (credit: Ender's Game)

We've known for a long time that people will do terrible things under orders—like hurt strangers. But why are we so easily persuaded to do things we wouldn't otherwise choose, even when nobody is holding guns to our heads? A new scientific experiment sheds light on this ancient ethical question.

University College London neuroscientist Patrick Haggard and his colleagues wanted to measure what's happening in the human brain when ordered to do something, versus choosing to do something. In Current Biology, the researchers report on how they reenacted a famous twentieth century experiment to find out.

Back in the early 1960s, a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram conducted a now-infamous set of experiments about how far people will go to follow orders. He asked volunteers to deliver an electric shock to a stranger. Unbeknownst to the volunteers, there was no shock—and the people they were shocking were actors pretending to be terribly hurt, even feigning heart attacks. Milgram found that most people would keep delivering the shocks when ordered by a person in a lab coat, even when they believed that person was gravely injured. Only a tiny percentage of people refused.