Motivated by the brutality of Nazi Germany, Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to test how people respond to authority. "Fourteen Yale psychology majors were provided with a detailed description of the experiment. They were asked to predict the hypothetical behavior of 100 subjects- in the following scenario. (Readings 98) .
Milgram selected a diverse group of males with different educational and occupational backgrounds to participate. Each of the males picked were assigned to the teacher role. Making them the person who truly believed they were administering shock to the accomplice (learner). As the teacher their job was to read a long list of word pairs, read the learner a word from the original series, then follow it by four terms. The job of the learner was to choose which word it was originally paired with and press a corresponding button, which would light up atop the shock generator for the teacher to view. For every wrong answer the teacher was to administer a shock to the learner and increase the shock by 15 volts. In reality the machine was fake and the "learner's- response to the shock(s) was pre recorded and played back at specific voltage amounts.
The majority of the students believed that only a small amount would actually administer the 450-volt shock. Unquestionably, these Yale seniors were proved wrong when not one person in the group stopped before the 300-volt level. The results could be interpreted in many ways. The study took place on Yale's campus. This might have affected the willingness of the subject to go on. "The subject believes that the learner has volunteered-(reading 100) as well and feels what he is doing, even inflicting pain upon another human, is for the good of the scientific research .The experimenter had no actual control over the subject, just a stern appearance, four manipulative probes to say when the subject tried to stop the procedure, and a gray lab coat.