A notorious experiment in the 1960s to find out if ordinary people were prepared to inflict pain if ordered to do so by an authority figure has reached an even more sinister conclusion.

Despite the lessons of history, nine in 10 would electrocute their peers even if they were screaming in agony, simply because they were told to do so.

When the original study was conducted by American psychologist Stanley Milgram, from Yale University, only two thirds of people continued all the way up to the maximum 450-volt level.

The experiments were devised to investigate the insistence by the German Nazi Adolf Eichmann, during his war crimes trial, that he and his accomplices in the Holocaust, were “just following orders.

Fifty years later, the new version of the experiment conducted in Poland has shown that human nature, if anything has got worse.