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The black-and-white squares exhibit Jonah's recalling did seem to be
one of the most memorable for many visitors to the Psychology
exhibition. The research he's referring to was by Stanley Milgram
(the machine in the case was his experimental apparatus). The video
was about later research by Phil Zimbardo (the Stanford Prison Study)
in which subjects played the roles of prisoners and guards. Both
studies were evidence of the "power of the situation": Under certain
conditions, many good people will do terrible things. As the project
lead Caryl Marsh once commented to me, however, perhaps a more
interesting and important question is under what conditions people
will resist -- and how do we raise children to be able to do that?
Caryl has written about this exhibit in a book about Stanley Milgram.
If anyone's interested, I should be able to locate this article. 

Wendy Pollock
ASTC
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