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Obedience to Authority

The experiment by Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, conducted 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 Crimes trials. Their defence often was based on "obedience" - - that they were just obeying orders whilst under the authority of their superiors.

The experiment began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann, and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

The results of the study were made known in Milgram's Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (1974).

So-called "teachers" (who were actually the unknowing subjects of the experiment) were recruited by Milgram in response to a newspaper ad offering $4.50 for one hour's work. Individual subjects thus recruited turned up to take part in a Psychology experiment investigating memory and learning at Linsly-Chittenden Hall on Yale University's old campus. He or she was introduced to a stern looking experimenter in a white coat and to a rather pleasant and friendly co-subject who was also presumably recruited via the newspaper ad. The experimenter explained that one subject would be assigned the role of "teacher" and the other would be assigned the role of "learner."

Two slips of paper marked "teacher" were handed to the subject and to the co-subject. The co-subject was actually an actor who, in posing as a subject to the experiment, subsequently claimed that his slip said "learner" such that the unknowing subject was inevitably led to believe that his role as "teacher" had been chosen randomly.

Both learner and teacher were then given a sample 45-volt electric shock from an apparatus attached to a chair into which the...