The life and development of society unfolds according to well-defined patterns. Social psychologists have repeatedly tried to study the characteristics of the human psyche and groups of people with the help of fascinating and sometimes shocking experiments. Today I would like to share with you one of such studies, the relevance of which is revealed in a new light today: THE MILGRAM EXPERIMENT. Let's start with the background. All began in the summer of 1961. Yale University professor Stanley Milgram was concerned about why, during Nazi rule, German citizens showed cruelty to concentration camp prisoners, and also participated in the extermination of these innocent people. The experiment was originally carried out in the United States, and the scientist did not see any urgent need to repeat it in Germany: German people are distinguished by discipline and a tendency to obey, which means that the results will be confirmed. The purpose of the experiment was to find out how much suffering one person is ready to cause to another, completely innocent, if this is “permitted” by the management and is part of his duties. Shocking, isn’t it? To the group subjects announced that they were participating in a study on the effects of pain on human memory. To conduct the experiment, an experimenter and 2 subjects were involved: “teacher” and “student”. I’ll tell you right away that the “student” was actually an actor. The task of the “student” was to memorize pairs of words from a long list, the task of the “teacher” was to check it and, in case of an error, give an electric shock. With each mistake, the strength of the electric shock increased. For the purity of the experiment, the roles of “teacher” and “student” were distributed seemingly randomly. At the beginning of the session, the “student” was tied to a chair with electrodes, and the “teacher” received an electric shock - after that he no longer doubted that everything was really happening. During the experiment, the “teacher” had to gradually increase the current strength from a “weak” one. at 15 V to the level of “Danger: hard-to-bear shock” of 450 V. (Remember that a standard outlet has only 220 V, and those who encountered an electric shock would not want to repeat this experience). The actor portraying the “student” did looks like he's getting electric shocks. On average, for every correct answer there were 3 incorrect ones. Thus, electric shocks occurred regularly. If the subject showed indecisiveness, the experimenter pushed him with phrases like “continue, please,” “the experiment requires you to continue.” After several electric shocks, the subject began to knock on the wall, then complain about heart problems, and then fell silent. As you already did , probably guessed it, most of the subjects were worried about the “student’s” condition and wanted to check how he was feeling. However, after assurances from the experimenter of the need to continue the experiment and assurances that they would not be held responsible for the consequences, they continued. There were those who insisted on stopping the experiment, citing its inhumanity, but the percentage of such people was small. Some shocking figures: 65% of participants gave a final (as they thought) powerful 450-volt shock. The conclusion that Milgram drew from this experiment: It is extremely difficult for a person to resist the order of an authority figure, even when he realizes that he is causing pain to another. Why today, more than half a century later, this has the experiment lost its relevance? Many of us are faced with the “watchman syndrome” - situations when a person, having a certain amount of power, tends to act in the most formalized manner, losing empathy, and sometimes even in opposition to human values. Have you encountered this? Similar mechanisms arise in modern people who are faced with stereotypical attitudes towards groups of other people. Having received “permission,” a person ceases to see unique individuals in front of him and automatically, sometimes quite cynically, hangs a “label” on them, assigns them to a certain category and, with the permission of the system, expresses, to put it mildly, not the most friendly attitude. And how does this essentially differ from the phenomenon that worried.