San Jose Mercury News reports that Santa Clara University has recently replicated Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1974 study in which people were told to administer painful electrical shocks on others.  Due to appear in the journal American Psychologist, the new study found once again that the vast majority of people will continue to intensify torturous electrical shocks if prodded to do so by an “authority figure”, even as the victims are screaming and pleading for them to stop. These researchers note that the lesson may not be simply “how cruel people can be”, so much as “how influential institutional circumstances can be” on human behaviour.  That is to say, the study shows how easily and quickly most people can adjust to the idea of torturing other humans, so long as the torture is given some quasi-legitimate rationale in an institutional setting… Certainly something to think about in relation to the American and Canadian government’s newfound justifications for torture, as well as in relation to forced psychiatric treatments in hospitals–particularly electroshock.