War means threat to people's lives. Research derived from terror management theory (TMT) illustrates that the awareness of death leads people to defend cultural ingroups and their worldviews to attain a sense of symbolic immortality and thereby buffer existential anxiety. This can result in hostile effects of mortality salience (MS), such as…

This article traces the history of obedience experiments that have used the Milgram paradigm. It begins with Stanley Milgram's graduate education, showing how some aspects of that experience laid the groundwork for the obedience experiments. It then identifies three factors that led Milgram to study obedience. The underlying principles or messages…

Jerry M. Burger's (see record 2008-19206-001) partial replication of Stanley Milgram's (1974) obedience study shows both the influence of culture and generations on behavior and the power of the situation. In Burger's data, disobedience has nearly doubled among male participants since the 1960s, a shift just as large as the increase in Americans'…