Stanley Milgram had shown that people would continue to shock someone who missed an answer to a question to deadly levels if ordered to by authority
Stanley Milgram is known for his influential studies on obedience, whose first incarnations appeared in the early 1960s at Yale, wherein a pair of volunteers would show up for a psychology âstudy of memoryâ; one would arbitrarily be designated the âteacher,â the other the âlearner.â Learner and teacher would be in separate rooms, hearing but not seeing each other. In the room with the teacher would be the lab-coated scientist supervising the study.
The teacher would recite pairs of words (from a list given by the scientist); the learner was supposed to remember their pairing. After a series of these, the teacher would test the learnerâs memory of the pairings. Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was supposed to shock them; with each mistake, shock intensity increased, up to a life-threatening 450 volts, ending the session.
Teachers thought the shocks were realâat the start theyâd been given a real shock, supposedly of the intensity of the first punitive one. It hurt. In reality no punitive shocks were givenâthe âlearnerâ worked on the project. As the intensity of the supposed shocks increased, the teacher would hear the learner responding in pain, crying out, begging for the teacher to stop. (In one variant the âvolunteerâ who became the learner mentioned in passing that he had a heart condition. As shock intensity increased, this learner would scream about chest pains and then go silent, seemingly having passed out.)
Amid the screams of pain, teachers would typically become hesitant, at which point theyâd be urged on by the scientist with commands of increasing intensity: âPlease continue.â âThe experiment requires that you continue.â âIt is absolutely essential that you continue.â âYou have no other choice. You must go on.â And, the scientist assured them, they werenât responsible; the learner had been informed of the risks.
And the famed result was that most volunteers complied, shocking the learner repeatedly. Teachers would typically try to stop, argue with the scientist, would even weep in distressâbut would obey. In the original study, horrifically, 65 percent of them administered the maximum shock of 450 volts.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 526). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type:đ´ Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:âď¸