Would you have been a Nazi?

reason:

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 little Wolfgang and Gretchen to healthful Party-sponsored summer camps. Being a Nazi was normal for many Germans. Would things have been any different for you or me if we had been unfortunate enough to grow up at that time and in that place?

Ronald Bailey, reason's science correspondent, goes on to show data that corroborates with an affirmative answer, although he doesn't come out and say so flatly. He then concludes:

Milgram didn't really explore why it was that Germans created death camps while Americans did not. The answer is liberty. In 1974, Milgram more generously noted, "It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." Americans have not escaped the natural human tendency to defer to authority. Instead, we have had the good fortune to find ourselves in the situation where our social institutions have traditionally limited what authorities can get away with. The institutions of liberty are what enable people to act on what Lincoln called, "the better angels of our nature."

One commenter is troubled:

your rejection of individual responsibility in the determination of personal action is disturbing. It is not institutions that have won us the liberty we enjoy today, but the constant endeavors of good men.

But this is a denial of Milgram's data, discussed in the body of the piece, which shows that most good people are easily cowed by authority.

One hopes a strong libertarian will not be so easily cowed into harming others, because libertarianism is deeply resistant to authority. But most ordinary people haven't built up that degree of stubbornness. This is where institutions of liberty like those provided by the U.S. Constitution come in.

The Framers were extremely skeptical of government authority, so they developed a system of checks and balances and codified great freedoms into the bill of rights.

That's what distinguishes America from pre-Nazi Germany. Not the "goodness" of its people, as Milgram's study demonstrates.