In the summer of 1961, a young American psychologist began an experiment on obedience at Yale University. Not yet 30, he’d recently earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard under the tutelage of Gordon Allport, and he wanted to understand how ordinary people could participate in atrocities.
The timing of the experiments didn’t seem coincidental. Just months earlier, the world had witnessed the beginning of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official who had helped administer Hitler’s death camps.
