In his Cornerstone talk Dr. Beck discussed the results of Stanley Milgram’s famous Obedience to Authority study. You’ll recall that in the study Milgram observed that about 65% of the normal population would administer potentially lethal shocks over the protests of the person being hurt.   For more see the Wikipedia article on the Milgram experiment.

On the day Dr. Beck gave his Spotlight lecture, the NPR radio news show, All Things Considered, broadcast an interview with Gina Perry, the author of Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments. In her book, Perry problematizes the Milgram study, detailing how she turned from a Milgram admirer to a critic. In order to balance your understanding of this famous experiment, listen to excerpts from the Perry interview on the NPR website.

To refresh your memory, you can watch the replication of the Milgram Study conducted for a British reality show here.

Discussion Questions:

1. A great deal of the unethical behavior done in the world is done people who, in retrospect, say that they were “just doing their job.” If that’s the case, how would an ACU education look if it were to prevent this from happening to our graduates? That is, what would ACU students need to think about and experience, even if it falls outside their major?
2. One of the things you hear college students say, at ACU and across the country, is this: “What does this class have to do with my major?” How might that attitude be a sort of “first step” down that path to the “I was just doing my job” temptation illustrated in the Milgram study? How would a college education look at it tried to push against this temptation?
3. Were there parts of Milgram’s experiment that troubled you? How do you respond to the criticisms that Perry levels against the Milgram study?