Free Republic

The Biden administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief is under investigation for allegedly handing no-bid contracts worth millions of dollars to previous colleagues, The Associated Press reported Thursday, citing sources familiar with the probe. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is conducting the investigation after at least a dozen employees, including some of DEA Administrator Anne Milgram’s previous associates, were hired under the contracts, according to the AP. One portion of the probe centers around $4.7 million for “strategic planning and communication” contracts handed to Milgram’s previous colleagues from the New Jersey attorney general’s office and at New York...

THE DEVON WHEELER EXPERIMENT There are two very famous psychology experiments and the one I inadvertently tripped face first into (Devon Wheeler above) clearly illustrate a lot of what is wrong with us “grand as gravy” people. How many of us have one ounce of individuality, of independent thought, or are we all just the same as sheep or dogs that blindly follow the pack wherever it goes? Merely rhetorical, of course. Firstly, the Stanford Prison Experiment is probably the most famous one. Briefly, in 1971, at Stanford, Phillip Zambrano conducted an experiment. He randomly selected 24 male students to...

Why is it so many people obey when they feel coerced? Social psychologist Stanley Milgram researched the effect of authority on obedience. He concluded people obey either out of fear or out of a desire to appear cooperative--even when acting against their own better judgment and desires. Milgram’s classic yet controversial experiment illustrates people's reluctance to confront those who abuse power. It is my opinion that Milgram's book should be required reading (see References below) for anyone in supervisory or management positions.

For a candidate that promised to bring the country together, Obama and his surrogates often go out of their way to deliberately insult roughly half the voting population by calling them fools. While it may seem counter intuitive, sociological research has shown that effective persuasion often involves convincing someone that they are wrong by belittling them. Sadly, this has dark implications for our democracy since this research was used to explain how an advanced nation duped its citizens into participating in the holocaust.

A new test of Milgram's obedience experiment asks if it can still happen here.Don't answer too hastily, but have you ever wondered what you would have done if you grew up in Nazi Germany? Of course, we all hope that we would have had the moral strength to stand against that monstrous regime, but can we be so sure? After all, times were tough and both important politicians and leading intellectuals supported Nazi theories and policies. And then there were the ordinary Germans, friendly neighbors like Karl and Lötte down the street. They had joined the Party and were sending...

The famous 6 degrees of separation theory fades under scrutiny. It’s rare for a sociological study to wind up a part of pop culture, but that’s what has happened to Stanley Milgram’s “small world” study, which posits that all of the people on the planet are connected to one another through an average of six acquaintances—or through six degrees of separation. The first popular use of Milgram’s study was the John Guare play Six Degrees of Separation, which was later made into a movie. Then came the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, created by college students, in which players...