Waaaaaaay back in the 1960s and 1970s, before university ethics committees stamped out these sorts of experiments, two researchers wanted to know more about how human beings reacted to authority, and how positional power impacted relationships. Stanley Milgram, a researcher at Yale, was interested in how Nazi Germany came to be, particularly the horrific and tragic treatment of Jews during this time. He wanted to understand how normal, decent people could be involved with or tolerate or turn a blind eye to state sanctioned cruelty (even psychopathy) of an appalling scale. He was interested in what part authority and obedience to authority,