Hans Asperger

I remember reading about the euthanasia of children deemed genetically inferior in the 80's, when I was involved in a crummy independent bookshop. I remember thinking that had I been that much more in difficulties as a child, that might have been my fate.

But they were dangerous times. It does not sound as though Asperger's hands were totally free of blood though. 

I agree with other observations along the lines of - how do we know we would not do the same during times such as those? What if things end up swinging towards something similar in the future.

There was an experiment called the Milgram experiment carried out a whhle ago. Seems that most people, when put under pressure from an authority, were willing to push a button said to administer massive electric shocks to another subject. Way too many people caved in and kept on pushing that button at higher and higher voltages, I fear.....

I think the Milgram experiment participants 'inflicted torture' for the opposite reasons to the people trapped in Nazi Germany. In the Milgram scenario, people most likely believed that a reputable university wouldn't actually torture people and certainly wouldn't kill study participants so they would have felt safe going along with things even when they seemed wrong - trusting that things couldn't actually be as they seemed.

In contrast, those trapped in Nazi Germany soon realised that the Nazi's held to no such ethical considerations and so they had no choice but to at least be seen to co-operate or face death themselves.  

The participants actually had no idea that it was a set up and the experiment was done for express purpose of trying to explain the atrocities that happened during WWII:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

In the original experiment, 65% of participants were willing to administer a lethal shock (450 V) to another human being upon being ordered to do so by the authority figure (who was really an actor, but the participants didn't know that). All of the participants went up to 300 V (which one can imagine would cause a lot of pain if 450 V would be lethal.

Scary stuff, especially considering the participants were under no perceived threat against themselves, but simply given orders by another person. Imagine how many people would have gone all the way to 450 V if their own lives, or the lives of family members, had been threatened (I'm guessing closer to 100%).

DragonCat16 said:

Scary stuff, especially considering the participants were under no perceived threat against themselves, but simply given orders by another person. Imagine how many people would have gone all the way to 450 V if their own lives, or the lives of family members, had been threatened (I'm guessing closer to 100%).

There was also the Stanford Prison Experiment, in the early seventies, which went rather wrong, and was recently made into a film and released on DVD etc.

The descriptive on the back of the DVD reads in part as follows:

What happens when a college psych study goes shockingly wrong?

In this tense, psychological thriller based on the notorious true story, Billy Crudup stars as Standford University Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who in 1971, cast 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated jail to examine the source of abusive behaviour in the prison system.

The results astonished the world, as participants went from middle-class undergrads to drunk-with-power sadists and submissive victims in just a few days.

And for a bit of further reading:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

DragonCat16 said:

Scary stuff, especially considering the participants were under no perceived threat against themselves, but simply given orders by another person. Imagine how many people would have gone all the way to 450 V if their own lives, or the lives of family members, had been threatened (I'm guessing closer to 100%).

There was also the Stanford Prison Experiment, in the early seventies, which went rather wrong, and was recently made into a film and released on DVD etc.

The descriptive on the back of the DVD reads in part as follows:

What happens when a college psych study goes shockingly wrong?

In this tense, psychological thriller based on the notorious true story, Billy Crudup stars as Standford University Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who in 1971, cast 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated jail to examine the source of abusive behaviour in the prison system.

The results astonished the world, as participants went from middle-class undergrads to drunk-with-power sadists and submissive victims in just a few days.

And for a bit of further reading:

https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html