Comparison of "The Perils of Obedience" and the "Stanford Prison Experiment"
             In the 1960s and early 1970s, seminal work in the field, such as Milgram's (1974) research on obedience to authority and the Stanford Prison experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973), continued to be motivated by a need to understand the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other acts of collective violence. To this day, these studies represent social psychology's most salient demonstrations of situationism-a core tenet of the field that emphasizes the power of the situational forces over human behavior.
             Both "The Perils of Obedience" and the "Stanford Prison Experiment" essentially demonstrate the potential for 'evil' in ordinary citizens when placed in situations where stark authority is pitted against the individual's own moral imperatives (Milgram) or when deindividuated potential perpetrators are given total power over powerless victims (Zimbardo). Though the experiments differed vastly in design and methodology, the point of both experiments was to observe how far an individual would go in inflicting increasing pain on a victim.
             There were several common ethical issues thrown up by both experiments. As Zimbardo says, "The line between Good and Evil lies in the center of every human heart...not in some abstract moral, celestial space..." (http://www.sonoma.edu/users/g/goodman/zimbardo.htm#prison). Similarly, Milgram observes, "Conservative philosophers argue that the very fabric of society is threatened by disobedience, while humanists stress the primacy of the individual conscience." Therefore, the same issue of ethics as in 'the individual conscience' is at the heart of both experiments on human psychology.
             The use of the individual's conscience and power to discriminate and act on one's judgement of right and wrong is demonstrated by both ...