This is one of the more interesting things I’ve read this week from What I Learned Today.

The Milgram experiment was a series of social and psychological experiments by Yale psychology professor Stanley Milgram.

The experiment was made to test the willingness of an individual to follow directions when asked to do a particular task by an apparent authority figure, even when the task conflicted with his/her own conscience. The test was conducted during the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Milgram wanted to find out whether Eichmann’s actions could be held against him if he was just following orders.

Milgram overlooked as two people — a “teacher” and a “learner” — were asked to go over a series of questions. The teacher (who was the actual subject of the Milgram experiment) had to ask the learner some questions, and if the learner got it wrong, the teacher had to give a quick electric shock. The teacher was told that the voltage of the shock would increase each time the learner got an answer wrong. Unbeknownst to the teacher, the learner was actually an actor that was part of the experiment, and nobody was actually getting shocked at all.

The study’s results are scary and fascinating. Nearly 2/3 of the participants ended up essentially “killing” their test subjects by administering the final 450-volt electric shock.

Throughout the experiment, the various “teachers” would stop and question their actions, but when the apparent authority figure (just somebody in a white lab coat) assured them that everything was ok, the teachers would go on with the experiment despite the fact that they could hear the agonizing screams from the other side of the wall.

Milgram says this about his findings:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The illustration below is borrowed from Wikipedia:

The experimenter (E) orders the Teacher (T) to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L),(who is actually an actor and confederate/stooge). The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. After being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level.

Derren Brown (master of illusion and trickery) reenacted the Milgram Experiment in The Heist back in 2006. The results are still the exact same as they were over 40 years ago. Watch The Heist below.

Previously on Doobybrain.com: Derren Brown goes to the Palisades Mall