The frightening thing about the Milgram experiment - which I take it was one of those Donuel was referring to - is that the people involved were not under any kind of "severe stress -- sleeplessness, hunger, pain and threat of death".

They had nothing real to gain by going along with the experimenters and doing what they had been told would involve inflicting torture and possible death on innocent victims, and nothing real to lose by refusing to do so. It was as if they were all geared up to become licensed torturers and killers, and were just waiting for permission to do so without fear of being punished for it.

And the assumption was that there is a very sizeable proportion of people like that - 60 per cent in fact was the proportion who seized the opportunity to "only obey orders" when it was offered to them. The obvious question is how far that was down to the nature of common humanity, and how far was this a refection of something in the particular society in which they had grown up, mainstream USA mid-20th century. And I'm not sure which is the more frightening of those options.