Milgram Obedience Experiment

Beginning in 1961, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments in which volunteer participants, believing they were assisting in a study of memory and learning, were instructed by an experimenter to administer what they thought were increasingly severe electric shocks to another person, actually an actor, whenever that person answered questions incorrectly. Milgram found that a substantial majority of participants continued administering shocks well past the point of the actor's simulated cries of pain and requests to stop, obeying the experimenter's instructions to continue, and the study is widely cited as demonstrating the willingness of ordinary people to follow instructions from an authority figure even when doing so appeared to cause serious harm to another person. The experiment's ethical treatment of participants, who were deceived and placed under significant psychological distress, later became a major catalyst for the development of formal ethical review standards in psychological research.