60% of us would give someone a potentially lethal electric shock just because we were told to.

The Milgram Experiment

This seems an unlikely statistic, and before the experiment was carried out, psychologists didn't belive it either as they thought that only a small minority, less than 3%, would deliberately harm someone for a psychological experiment.

The studay carried out in the early 1960's proved very different results which have since been repeated with similar conclusions. The test subjects were told that they were taking part in an experiment about punishment and learning. They were to be the experimenters with the subjects in another room. They asked the 'subject', who was really an actor, a series of questions and each time the actor got a question wrong, they were told to press a switch. They were told that the switches delivered an increasingly painful electric shock to the subject, whom they could hear was in pain from the sounds coming from the other room. On beginning the experiment the actor told them that he had a weak heart, yet almost two thirds of people carried on giving the shocks until the highest level, even when the switches became labeled, 'danger:severe shock' and lastly, 'XXX'.

Most people became extremely distressed during the experiment and showed a wish to stop, but when the supervisor told them that they must continue, they kept going. There are several possible reasons for this blind obedience, such as the trust the subjects had in the safety of the experiment as it was conducted at Yale Univerity and the supervisor was supposed to be an expert. Furthermore, as the shocks went up in 15 volt jumps, it was hard for people to draw the line as the next shock was only slightly more than the one before. One of the biggest factors encouraging obedience was the physical presence of the supervisor telling them to continue and many participants found that they couldn't say no. 

At the time, this experiment had even more terrifying significance as the trial of WWII criminal, Eichmann had just begun, whose main defence was that he was just following orders. Looking at the results of this experiment was that simply the bottom line? and would any of us have done the same?

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974