Introduction
There is genuine merit in the argument that it is in human nature to be cruel to others. This supposition is favored by the responses elicited by the various subjects in experiments conducted by Milgram and by Darley and Latane. In Milgram’s experiments, subjects were instructed to increasingly inflict electric shock pain on another human every time they failed to answer a question correctly (Milgram 60). Almost all the subjects obeyed, seemingly to maintain social etiquette or avoid disapproval from the authority figure of the instructor. In Darley and Latane, several experiments showed that people are less likely to ...
