We watched and interesting film last night, The Experimenter. It's a story about Stanley Milgram, a Yale university psychologist, who conducted an experiment on obedience to authority figures. It was a series of social psychology experiments. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a wide range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, even thought unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress. Milgram devised his psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: "Could it be that Adolf Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? He summarized his findings writing "Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority. In the end, many people disputed that Milgram's findings adequately explained the Holocaust.
On the brighter side of life, our friend, Radek, returned to live in Poznań and we will meet with him on Saturday. And.........today was Wednesday and since Joan and I are well again, we were able to meet with Zbyszek at Kandulski's. We talked about my hand surgery, the surgeon and that I waited three weeks for him to call me back. I finally called HIM yesterday morning and he said he would call me back in the evening. He did not. I think it is time to find another surgeon. We went a little earlier than our meeting time so I could drop off our Polish tax information at the tax adviser's office.
Wednesday, March 08, 2017
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