Experiment

October marks the 50th anniversary of Yale University psychology researcher Stanley Milgram’s first published paper on his infamous shock machine experiments. (Ah, the 1960s in psychology research — when ethics were just something left to philosophers, not psychologists or doctors.)

You probably remember the experiment from your Introduction to Psychology class. Milgram designed a set of experiments where the subject sat next to an electrical “shock machine” that wasn’t hooked up to the subject, but rather to another person hidden from view. It had a set of switches that would give greater and greater voltage shocks to the other person when pressed.

The subject was designated as “the teacher” and the other person was “the learner.” When the learner didn’t learn, the teacher had to administer a shock. A man in a lab coat — “the experimenter” — directed the subject when to administer shocks of increasing intensity when the learner answered a question incorrectly.

What Milgram claimed to have found was that people are easily subjugated and will readily follow instructions to “do evil” to another human. But a more nuanced review of Milgram’s experiments show something quite different.