Milgram's Obedience Experiment

Just missing out on the top spot in our run down of the least ethical experiments of all time is Stanley Milgram's study of obedience. How far would you go if someone was telling you to turn evil? Maybe you feel one of the other experiments is worse.

	1961
	Can inherently good people be turned evil by authority?
	Order a volunteer to give someone increasingly severe punishments until they (seem to) die.
	If someone in authority tells you to do something, most likely you’ll do it.
	Volunteers, who didn’t know what they’d signed up for, thought they’d knowingly killed someone. That’s going to have a lasting effect.
	4/5

Details:
In 1961 Stanley Milgram made the headlines with his hugely controversial and unethical study into human obedience to authority. Taking place only months into the trials of WWII Nazi leaders, Milgram aimed to discover if those who committed the atrocities in concentration camps were truly evil people, or simply following orders from a higher figure.

Participants were given the role of ‘teacher’, and told by the experimenter to administer electric shocks to the ‘learner’, a fellow participant in a separate room, if they answered questions incorrectly. The ‘learner’ was a confederate of the experimenter, and no actual shocks were given.

With every wrong answer, participants were told to up the voltage of the shock administered, and as the volts increased, the ‘learner’ was heard to scream, cry and beg the ‘teacher’ to stop.

Shockingly, under the verbal prompting of the experimenter, 65% of participants continued to shock the ‘learner’, even after the screaming gave way to silence, until three shocks of 450 volts had been administered.

Although no actual electric shocks occurred, this study caused huge psychological issues for participants who had been lead to believe they had seriously harmed, or even killed, somebody.

Milgram certainly proved his point that individuals are capable of evil acts when obeying authority, but the amount of pressure he put on the volunteers during the experiment and amount of distress they experienced rightly puts Stanley into our top ten.

Image: Dan Brady

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