It's easy to be bad

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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.
24 Feb 2016 English United Kingdom Science

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