Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram, who was a Yale University psychologist in the 1960s, wanted to see how a person would react to someone in authority telling them to do something against their better judgment. Sparked by the trial of the WWII criminal Adolph Eichmann, who’s defense was that he was only following orders, Milgram put together an experiment. Milgram’s experiment was to test the power of authority on the obedience of others.

In this experiment, there was an ad put in the newspaper looking for volunteers for, what they called, a memory test. The volunteers were brought into a room, one by one, with an actor posing as a professor and another person (Bob), who was also an actor. The professor told them that they were going to test the memory of a person after receiving a certain voltage of electric shock. One person would be the teacher and the other one, the student. The volunteer and Bob both drew straws, which were rigged, to see who would be in which role. Each time, the volunteer was the teacher. Bob then went into a room and was hooked up to an electric shock generator.

The generator didn’t really have an electrical current going through it, but the volunteer didn’t know this. The switches on the generator were labeled from 30 volts, increasing in 15 volt intervals, all the way to 450 volts, labeled “XXX”. The “teacher” would ask Bob a question, and for every wrong answer, an electric shock was given to him by the teacher flipping one of the switches. Some of the volunteers would question the professor about whether they should quit delivering shocks to Bob, but the professor would urge them to keep going, in the name of science. When the teacher got to a certain voltage, Bob would quit answering. Most of the volunteers asked if they should quit asking questions. The professor told the volunteer that silence should be taken as a wrong answer. Some volunteers went all the way through the experiment, delivering the fatal shock of 450 volts, while only some of the...