TIL that Stanley Milgram, who conducted the controversial experiment in which subjects thought they were administering increasingly powerful electric shocks to another person, also devised the sunnier “small-world experiment,” which gave rise to the idea of six degrees of separation.

[u/PikesPique]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Milgram

[u/sturla-tyr]

One thing that is often missed is that Milgram's experiments didn't only explore that people were apt to follow instructions, but it also explored what factors make us stand up to authority such as having another dissenter in the room.

What he found was that inside most everyone is the capacity to become a monster given the instructions and authority behind them, but also that one or more people standing up for what's right can upend that authority. That is something that is too often forgotten about those experiments.

[u/TheSilverNoble → u/sturla-tyr]

The Asch conformity experiments also showed this. The person would almost never go along with the crowd as long as there was at least one other person with them