Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, sought out the reasoning behind Nazi soldiers and their orders, especially after the Nuremberg War Criminal trials in World War II. Some of the Nazis knew killing Jews was immoral, but they proceeded to do it anyway. Why did they do it? Stanley Milgram jumped on the case and conducted an experiment to see to what extent people will go to obey higher authority (McLeod, 2007).
The experiments began in July of 1961 at Yale University. Milgram put an ad in the paper for male participants to help with an educational study. The participants that had been selected were paid just for showing up. The experiment involved three people: the scientist (actor), the learner (actor), and the teacher (participant). The learner and teacher would randomly draw to find out who would receive which role, but it was fixed so the participant would receive the teacher every time (McLeod, 2007).
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The shock started from 15 volts and increased by 15 per wrong answer up a maximum shock of 450 volts (Milgram Experiment-Obedience to Authority, 2015). In Milgram’s first experiment, fifteen out of the forty participants refused to continue at some point in the experiment, while 25 participants continued all the way to 450 volts, “shocking” the learner three times before the acting scientist ended the experiment. The teachers, however, did not know that there were no shocks and the procedure was perfectly safe. To sell the fact that the learners were hurt, the scientist would bring out the acting learner whose face was “covered in tears and looked haggard” to meet one of the participants, Joseph Dimow. The actor “thanked” him for stopping the experiment and noted the anticipation was worse than the shock