“Every crisis reveals something about human nature. The pandemic revealed something most of us were not prepared to see, about compliance, about conscience, and about the small minority who refused.”

Every obedience experiment in history had the same overlooked finding.

Not everyone complied.

In Milgram’s laboratory at Yale in 1961, 65 percent of participants delivered what they believed were potentially lethal electric shocks to a stranger, simply because a man in a white coat told them to. The world remembered that number. It became the defining fact of the experiment. The evidence of how easily ordinary people could be led to do terrible things.

But 35 percent refused.

In Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, 75 percent of participants denied obvious visual evidence at least once to match a unanimous wrong group. That number too became the headline. The proof of social pressure’s power.

But 25 percent never conformed. Not once, across any trial.

In Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards became cruel within days and the prisoners psychologically broke. That became the story ,the terrifying demonstration of how quickly roles override character.

But at least one guard refused to dehumanize. And one prisoner did something even more remarkable: he demanded a lawyer instead of a doctor, breaking the psychological frame of the entire experiment by insisting on his identity outside the role the situation had assigned him.

We spent decades studying the ones who complied.

We wrote the textbooks about them. We built the psychology curricula around them. We used their compliance as the lens through which we understood human nature under pressure.

We barely asked what made the others different.

That question matters more now than it ever has.

Continue reading at link below:

https://kennycarmody.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-the-resisters-what