Milgram's Obedience To Authority Experiment
Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, designed a study focusing on the conflict between obedience to authority and personal conscience. “He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on “obedience”—that they were just following orders of their superiors.” [1]
The design of this experiment was simple: two people would come into the psychology laboratory to take part in a study of memory and learning. One person would be the “teacher” and the other a “learner.” The experimenter explained that the study was concerned with the effects of punishment and learning. Unbeknownst to the “teacher”, the study was designed to find out how much pain a person would inflict on another human being just because they were ordered to do so. The learner is taken to another room, seated in a small electric chair, their arms are strapped to prevent a lot of movement and an electrode is attached to their wrist. The learner is told that they will be read a list of words, and that they will be tested on their ability to remember the second word of the pair when they hear the first one again. If they make an error, they will receive electric shocks of increasing intensity. The teacher is then seated in front of a shock generator. On the panel of the generator are switches, each labeled with a voltage ranging from 14 to 450 volts. Before the actual experiment started, the “teacher” was given a real shock of 45 volts. This was done in order to make the teacher believe that the “learner” is actually being shocked.
During the experiment, Dr. Milgram noticed that conflict did not start until the learner started showing discomfort. “At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become vehement and emotional....
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