65% of ordinary people obeyed orders to deliver lethal electric shocks
In 1961, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram tested how far people would obey an authority figure. Participants, cast as "teachers," were instructed to shock a learner for incorrect answers, increasing power up to 450 volts. Despite hearing actor-learners scream in agony and eventually fall silent, 65% of participants delivered the maximum 450-volt shock when sternly told to continue. The study revealed obedience overrides personal conscience far more easily than expected.
An Inquiry Born from the Shadow of War
In July 1961, just three months after the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem, a 27-year-old assistant professor of psychology at Yale University named Stanley Milgram began an experiment that would upend conventional assumptions about human morality. Eichmann's defense had leaned heavily on the claim that he was simply an administrator carrying out orders within a bureaucratic hierarchy. Milgram wanted to investigate whether there was a particular defect in the German character that accounted for the atrocities of the Holocaust, or if ordinary people anywhere could be induced to inflict terrible suffering simply because an authority figure told them to do so.
To test this, Milgram placed advertisements in local New Haven newspapers seeking male participants for a study supposedly examining memory and learning. He recruited a wide cross-section of society: laborers, white-collar clerks, high school teachers, engineers, and salesmen, ranging in age from 20 to 50. Each participant was paid $4.50 simply for showing up at the prestigious Yale psychology laboratory, and they were informed that the money was theirs to keep regardless of what happened once they arrived.
The setup was an elaborate deception. When a participant arrived, he met another volunteer—who was secretly a 47-year-old accountant hired as a confederate by Milgram—and an experimenter dressed in an impartial grey technician's lab coat. The two men drew slips of paper from a hat to determine who would play the role of the "teacher" and who would be the "learner." In reality, the draw was completely rigged; both slips bore the word "Teacher," ensuring that the genuine participant was always cast in the role tasked with administering the punishment.