The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments

Dr. Robert Cialdini mentioned in his book Influence a couple of psychological experiments conducted earlier in the previous century.

The purpose of these experiments aside, it shows how humans can be pushed, as well as made to do things they don't want to at an extreme level. You can skip to the movies linked to below if you like.

The Milgram experiment concentrated on our adherence to authority.

From Wikipedia--

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The Standford Prison experiment, from Wikipedia--

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The students who were assigned to be the prisoners were paid $15 a day as an incentive, which is worth about $80 per day in 2008 currency.

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These experiments speak for themselves, and you can watch them here:

Stanford Prison experiment (watch in order):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o0Nx31yicY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCsgwcIil7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU6r4mNZ8g0

Milgram experiment:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8325294940857002700&q=milgram+experiment&ei=BYlYSNSGPJzG2wKw7ZmADw

And revisited:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6GxIuljT3w

Pinky.