Some interesting experimental results are discussed in this CNN report that are applicable to the original question in this thread:
Charting the psychology of evil
Quote:
If someone told you to press a button to deliver a 450-volt electrical shock to an innocent person in the next room, would you do it?
Common sense may say no, but decades of research suggests otherwise.
In the early 1960s, a young psychologist at Yale began what became one of the most widely recognized experiments in his field. In the first series, he found that about two-thirds of subjects were willing to inflict what they believed were increasingly painful shocks on an innocent person when the experimenter told them to do so, even when the victim screamed and pleaded.
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After thinking about this a bit I'm wondering if the gradual approach, increasing the pain to be applied in small steps, has a lot to do with the success of these experiments. Each step is just a little bit more than the last one, so the test subjects have a hard time deciding when enough is enough.
Looking at how our civil rights are being gradually taken away, I think this lesson was not lost on TPTB. Okay Bob, now baby step into a police state....