This post is co-written with James Pennebaker, Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. Since the publication of the Facebook experiment in the highly ...

Why do we obey authority figures, conform to group pressure, or change our opinions based on what others around us say?

In the early 1960s, a deceptively simple question took shape inside a laboratory at Yale University: how far would an ordinary person go if instructed by an authority figure to harm someone else? The ...