You may have heard about the experiment conducted a Yale by Stanley Milgram in which he attempted to work out scientifically how many people would send bursts of electricity into another human being at increasing voltage, at the command of a man in a lab coat; subjects would continue to do so even after they thought the person they were electrocuting was unconscious or dead. What you may not know is that Milgram made a movie about the experiment, which he narrated in the calmest and creepiest voice imaginable.
Even assured as I am by Milgram that everyone involved but the person inflicting torture on the order of an authority figure is in on the 'gag', and that no real electricity was involved, the whole experiment strikes me as sociopathic, a fine way of testing for people willing to torture on the order of some authority figure. The fact that this was conducted under the aegis of Yale University somehow does not surprise me. Although there are plenty of overeducated creeps everywhere you look, somehow Yale feels to me like the sort of place where they'd think this was a jolly good idea for scientific methodology.