Obedience occurs when you change your opinions, judgments, or actions because someone in a position of authority told you to. The key aspect to note about obedience is that just because you have changed in some way, it does not mean that you now agree with the change.

If an authority figure ordered you to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person, would you follow orders? Most people would answer with an adamant "no." However, the Milgram obedience experiment aimed to prove otherwise.

Milgram's experiments were born out of a desire to understand the Nazis' persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. This article argues that the study of Jewish resistance against that persecution also furthers our understanding of Milgram's experiments. A recognition of uncertainty and multiple authorities provides a more nuanced understanding of obedience and shows that, contrary to common assumptions about both Milgram's experiments and the Holocaust, neither resistance nor obedience is 'ordinary' or straightforward.

The model explains significant details in accounts of the 1942 massacres of some 3,200 Jewish civilians at Józefów and Lomazy, Poland, by Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101. The use of historical analyses to test nomothetic psychological theories offers unique opportunities for advancing understanding of destructive obedience

For historians the Holocaust is among the most complex historical situations in which to explain perpetrator obedience. There has been a long tradition of trying to comprehend the 'Nazi mind,' but Milgram's obedience experiments came at just the point when judicial proceedings in West Germany were shifting the focus to the collective behavior of the cohorts of regular policemen and security officers who actually had to do the face-to-face killing, and whose ideological commitment was muted or even nonexistent. This explains why Milgram's experiments had an immediate appeal to anyone trying to explain obedience to commit atrocity once it was evident that those who had perpetrated it were not psychopaths or criminally abnormal. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between history and psychology as it has evolved over the past 50 years and to suggest ways in which Milgram's work still stimulates current history writing.

Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist. He served on the faculty at Yale University, Harvard University, and the City University of New York. While at Yale, he conducted a seminal series of experiments on obedience to authority, which have come to be known simply as the infamous "Milgram experiment." Milgram conducted a number of other studies, including the small-world experiment (the source of the six degrees of separation concept), and also introduced the concept of familiar strangers.

The Milgram Re-enactment is a re-enactment of Dr Stanley Milgram's infamous 1961 social psychology experiment 'Obedience to Authority'. Where participants were asked to give apparently lethal electric shocks to an unwilling victim to test how far they would be prepared to obey an authoritative scientist and inflict pain on a protesting person.