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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Storyteller01" data-source="post: 3073713" data-attributes="member: 20931">You may want to look into Milgram's study on obedience. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment</a>Especially this quote:Before the experiment was conducted Milgram polled fellow psychologists as to what the results would be. They unanimously believed that only a sadistic few (0.1%), would be prepared to give the maximum voltage.In Milgram's first set of experiments, 67.5 percent (27 out of 40) of experimental participants administered the experiment's final 450-volt shock, though many were quite uncomfortable in doing so; everyone paused at some point and questioned the experiment, some even saying they would return the check for the money they were paid. No participant steadfastly refused to give further shocks before the 300-volt level. Variants of the experiment were later performed by Milgram himself and other psychologists around the world with similar results. Apart from confirming the original results the variations have tested variables in the experimental setup.Dr. Thomas Blass of the University of Maryland Baltimore County (who is also the author of a biography of Milgram, called The Man who Shocked the World) performed a meta-analysis on the results of repeated performances of the experiment. He found that the percentage of participants who are prepared to inflict fatal voltages remains remarkably constant, between 61% and 66%, regardless of time or location (a popular account of Blass' results was published in Psychology Today, March/April 2002). The full results were published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology (Blass, 1999).Emphasis mine.Please note that the subjects came from varied levels of education; several of them would have known they were 'applying' potentially lethal voltage to the the subject.Also, as far as the subjects of the experiment were concerned they were consciously applying increasing amounts of pain on another 'subject'.  This is torture, something worse than assassination by D&D standards.</blockquote>

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