During the first half of the 20th century, Europeans were subjected to extreme human brutality. Millions of people were killed in the first World War, millions of people were killed by communists creating and mismanaging the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and millions of people were killed in the second World War.
Given this history, it was natural for people to be interested in studies examining human obedience to authority figures and human brutality. The best-known experiments examining these issues were conducted during the 1960s in the United States, led by Stanley Milgram. During the experiments, the subjects were told that their job was to administrate increasing electric shocks when learners made mistakes, aiming to study how people learn.
Milgram and the people with whom he discussed these experiments in advance expected low levels of obedience. However, most participants in the experiments continued administering electric shocks until reaching the maximum level determined by the experiment designers, despite the expressed extreme suffering and protests from the learners.
It looked like Milgram examined very different people than those who committed atrocities in Europe. However, from an early age, these Americans and Europeans were educated in the same Prussian education system, which travelled from Europe to America during the second half of the 19th century. Obedience to authority figures was one of the main goals of the Prussian education system. Thus, the American population in 1960s was not the same as the people who created the United States. Connecticut, where the experiments were conducted, was among the early adopters of the Prussian academic system in the United States.
For a brief description of the Prussian academic system see “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”, and “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?” For examples of the current problems in our Prussian education system, see “Peer Review of Academic Articles: Gold Standard or Paper Money Standard?”, “Measuring Performance in Education. Why Do Many Teachers Dislike It?”, and the articles you can reach from them.
There is no reason to attribute the results of Milgram experiments to human nature. While human nature does matter, subjecting children to obedience training from an early age through the Prussian academic system is likely to matter more. The harm done by the Prussian academic system, which we still use today, goes far beyond the poor academic results we see in schools.
