Next week, I'll lead a reading group that reviews some of the classic studies in social psychology.  Because Stanley Milgram's Obedience expierments had the biggest initial impact on my own practice of "minding the law," I thought it was a great study for my students to begin with and a perfect topic to kick off this blog.

Students commonly assume that, even if Milgram’s famous experiment sheds important light on the power of situation today, were his experiment precisely reproduced today, it would not generate comparable results. To oversimplify the argument behind that claim: The power of white lab coats just ain’t what it used to be. Of course, that assertion has been difficult to challenge given that the option of replicating the Milgram experiment has been presumptively unavailable — indeed, it has been the paradigmatic example of why psychology experiments must be reviewed by institutional review boards (”IRBs”).

Here are a variety of videos and podcasts that in some way involve revisiting Milgram's obedience experiment.