After conducting an experiment which tested several subjects’ abilities to resist authority, Stanley Milgram came to the conclusion that acts of evil are not conducted by sadistic humans, but obedient ones. This concept, known as the banality of evil, was introduced in Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and can be traced to the Nuremburg Trials, in which Nazi Germans killed millions of Jews based on the orders that they were told to follow. In the experiment, subjects were told to send a series of shocks to a patient, with each shock containing increasingly more voltage. Milgram found that most subjects were willing to shock the patients despite hearing cries of agony, either because the subjects allowed responsibility to be placed on the
