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A recent book about the legacy of the famous Milgram obedience experiments, Behind the Shock Machine, has unearthed similar controversial experiments that were performed at La Trobe University during the 1970s. The Milgram experiments were conducted in 1961 in the wake of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem and involved test subjects being ordered by an official to dispense electric shocks to another person. The aim was to test whether there was mutual intent among those who prosecuted the Holocaust.

Why do these experiments continue to grab our attention? Can we better understand our own capacity for cruelty?

In high school I participated in a series of social psychology experiments designed to measure the likelihood that people would be true to their word. In one of these trials, I sat down next to a woman on a park bench and asked her if she would mind watching my bag for a moment. I reassured her that I would be back in less than five minutes and she agreed.

In the second part of the experiment my classmate came to the bench and took my bag. The woman didn’t say a word in defence of my handbag. In the majority of cases our unsuspecting guinea pigs didn’t object to the simulated theft.

Later that afternoon, seeing us all together, the same woman approached us to ask what we’d been doing. When we explained the nature of the experiment to her, she was angry and embarrassed.

At the time I felt nothing but contempt. After all, she had let someone take my bag without saying a word. I imagined she was different from me. I imagined that I would never do the same if I was in her shoes. I of course would make up part of the minority that would keep my promise.

It’s shocking for most of us to read the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiments. A substantial proportion of his subjects chose to administer what they thought were fatal shocks to their fellow students, in experiments that were misrepresented as a study to measure the effects of punishment on learning. Many participants were left with the unbearable realisation that they would follow killing orders.

We were shown to be mistaken about the location of evil within the individual, and instead had to face the possibility that most of us were capable of following orders that demanded we inflict pain on others. We had to face that most of us could be obedient to the point of destruction.