milgrams obedience study

Basically, he had trained an accomplice who would pretend to have electric shocks. The experimental subjects were placed in front of a dial, which they were told would administer an increasing levels of electric shocks to the actor. They asked the subject a series of straightforward word pair questions, and when he got the answers wrong, they had to give an electric shock. The subjects were told that this was part of an experiment, by someone in a white coat. In one case, the subject was informed that the person they were administering "shocks" to had a heart condition.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

Please continue. The experiment requires that you continue. It is absolutely essential that you continue. You have no other choice, you must go on. If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.

The experiment was inspired by the Holocaust - were the Germans in league with the Nazis, or where they simply following orders as they exterminated the Nazi's victims? Milgram wanted to study whether people would obey an authority figure, or would their own morals make them stop the experiment?

The result - 65% of people administered the maximum 450-volt shock. Only one refused to go above 300 volts.

From source below (Milgram's notes): I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The