If you ever did social psychology in high school or university, you may have come across any of the following major "canonical" social psychology experiments (both laboratory and "natural" experiments) that deal with conformity and obedience:

* 1961: Milgram experiment
* 1964: Kitty Genovese case
* 1967: Third Wave experiment
* 1968: blue eyes/brown eyes experiment
* 1971: Stanford prison experiment

What struck me was that they all took place within the same decade, and all seem to serve a didactic purpose of showing how easy it is for ordinary people to slip into unthinking conformity and obedience, and many of these still routinely crop up in introductory psychology classes and textbooks as parable-like anecdotes. While any of them were non-professional cases that grabbed headlines, the two academic laboratory studies were also designed in a sensationalist manner (leading to a lot of subsequent criticisms and controversy over their ethical and methodological soundness).

Why was there an explosion of interest during the 1960s in conformity, obedience, in-/out-group formation? What kinds of political, social, and cultural trends and anxieties fuelled this interest? How does this apparent fad reflect the state of social psychology as a discipline at the time, and in turn, how did academic social psychology as a discipline respond to, or was transformed by, these broader interests? How did these experiments and anecdotes get "canonized" in introductory social psychology classes even to this day?