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Stanley Milgram conducted the Milgram Experiment on obedience to authority at Yale University in 1963. Forty predominately, possibly all, white men from various class backgrounds and occupations participated in the experiment. Milgram gave each participant $450 and explicitly stated before the experiment started that they would receive the full amount no matter happened; it was theirs simply for showing up.
The Milgram Experiment was conducted under the guise of an experiment on the effects of learning through discipline. “Learners” were “tested” on their ability to memorize a list of word pairs, receiving a “shock” for each wrong answer. For example, the words “Blue Girl” was a pair the Learner was asked to memorized, then he was asked if “Blue” went with “Boy, Girl, Grass, or Hat.” Meanwhile, “Teachers” were asked to shock the Learners every time they answered a word pair wrong. With every wrong answer, the voltage increased. If the Teacher protested or asked about the safety of the Learner, he was urged by Milgram to continue with the test.
The Learner sat in a separate room, communicating with the Teacher through a microphone. The Teacher sat at a desk operating the shock machine. He could hear and communicate with the Learner via a microphone and speakers. Milgram sat behind the Teacher; he communicated only with the Teacher.
The Teachers were the real subjects of the experiment, while the Learners were actors. The Learners were not actually being shocked; instead, their responses were pre-recorded to correspond with the number of voltage that they were receiving. As the voltage increased, the Learner stated that his heart was bothering him, then he begged for the experiment to cease, and eventually he refused to participate, remaining silent.
Milgram’s responses were also scripted to correspond with the number of times the Teachers protested. Only if the Teacher asked for the experiment to stop four consecutive times would Milgram end the experiment. Milgram’s experiment resulted in 60% of the Teachers fully completing the experiment.
Motivated by an interest in individual participation in the Nazi Party, Milgram’s experiment tested not the cruelty of the Teachers, but rather how far they would go to fulfill the orders of the experiment and the experimenter. In watching the experiment, the Teachers are visibly uncomfortable, stressed, and acting against their ethics, yet they felt compelled to follow the rules of the establishment and the requests of the authority figure.
