Milgram’s experiment of obedience was done in 1961 soon after WW2 and the trials for war crimes against the Nazi’s were being done. In Milgram’s obedience to authority experiment, two people came per session. They thought they were testing the effects of pain on memory. Only one of the participants was an actual volunteer. The other person worked for Milgram. The actual volunteer was labeled as the teacher and the other person (the one that worked for Milgram) was labeled as the learner. For the experiment ,Milgram designed a shock generator: an electric device with 30 toggle switches labeled with voltage levels starting at 30 volts and increasing by 15 volt intervals up to 450 volts. These switches were labeled in groups such …show more content…
The teacher was instructed to increase the voltage every time the learner missed a question. The learner began screaming in pain. At 300 volts, the learner refused to answer any more questions. The experiment was supposed to end when the learner received 450 volts or when the teacher refused to continue. Surprisingly, 65% of the teachers continued to administer the shocks until they reached the 450 volts, the end of the experiment. This shocked Milgram and his team. The teachers had nothing to lose by stopping and could have left at anytime. Milgram's research was important to the study of human behavior because it questioned many parts of it, especially submission to authority. The participants in his experiment would have had nothing to lose if they chose to walk out of the room they were in, but instead they decided to follow "unwritten rules of acceptable social behavior”.Following the experiment participants were debriefed and they were informed that the shock apparatus was not real and that the protests from the learners were scripted. Many of the subjects expressed emotional upset as they thought that they were inflicting immense pain on another person and that the high voltage shocks that they apparently administered had the capacity to kill