In July 1961, a psychologist at Yal

In July 1961, a psychologist at Yale University, Dr. Stanley Milgram, a 28-year-old Harvard graduate with a PhD in social psychology, began a series of experiments that were destined to shock the psychological community and reveal some disturbing insights into the capacity of the human race to inflict harm on one another. Participants in the experiments were members of the general public who had responded to a newspaper advertisement for volunteers in an experiment on punishment and learning. The “teacher” in the experiment (one of Milgram’s team of researchers)
instructed the participants to inflict increasingly powerful electric shocks on a test “learner” every time the learner gave an incorrect answer to a word matching task. The shocks started, in theory, at the low level of 15 volts and increased in 15-volt increments up to a potentially fatal shock of 450 volts. In reality, the voltage machine was an elaborate stage prop, and the learner was an actor screaming and imitating physical suffering as the voltage level of each shock appeared to increase. The participants were told about the deception at the end of the experience, but during the experiment they were led to believe that the voltage and the pain being inflicted were real. The teacher used no force or intimidation in the experiment other than maintaining an air of academic seriousness.
The experiment was repeated more than 20 times using hundreds of research subjects. In every case the majority of the subjects failed to stop shocking the learners, even when they believed they were inflicting a potentially fatal voltage and the learner had apparently stopped screaming with pain. Some did plead to stop the test, and others argued with the teacher that the experiment was going wrong, but in the end, the majority of them obeyed the instructions of the teacher to the letter.
It’s important to remind ourselves that these research participants were not criminals or psychopaths with a documented history of sadistic behavior. They were average Americans who responded to an ad and came in off the street to take part. What Milgram’s research appears to tell us is that people are capable of suspending their own individual morality to someone in authority—even killing someone just because they were instructed to do it.
Milgram’s research shocked the academic world and generated heated debate about the ethical conduct of the study and the value of the results in comparison to the harm infl icted on the research participants who were led to believe that it was all really happening. That debate continues to this day, even though subsequent repetitions of the study in various formats have validated Milgram’s original fi ndings. Almost 50 years later, we are faced with research data that suggest ordinary human beings are capable of performing destructive and inhumane acts without any physical threat of harm to themselves. As Thomas Bass commented, “While we would like to believe that when confronted with a moral dilemma we will act as our conscience dictates, Milgram’s obedience experiments teach us that in a concrete situation with powerful social constraints, our moral senses can easily be trampled.”