The Experiment That "Shocked" the World.
In the 1960s, Yale professor Stanley Milgram conducted his initial experiment to determine how much harm ordinary people would do to another person if directed and urged to do so by an authority. However, he claimed to his test subjects that he wanted to test the effect of pain and negative reinforcement on memory. A question that many people produce after learning about this experiment is how or why someone would do something like this?.
Milgram's experiment was inspired in part by a desire to understand the behavior of citizens and soldiers of Nazi Germany. This experiment is probably the most famous example in defense of what happened to the soldiers of Nazi Germany by showing that if one is ordered to do something with immoral consequences; the moral responsibility belongs solely to the person giving the order, not the one following it. .
In his experiment, the researcher administering the test told each volunteer that two subjects were needed for each test, one "teacher" and one "learner." The learner would try to memorize a set of word pairs, and then attempt to match a word with its correspondent. Each time the learner answered wrong, the teacher would administer an electric shock, with each shock 15 volts stronger than the previous one. To obtain the shock intervals there were 30 switches at 15-volt intervals labeled as follows: Slight shock (15-60 volts), Moderate shock (75-120 volts), on up to Extreme-intensity shock (315-360 volts), DANGER severe shock (375-420 volts), and XXX (435-450 volts). The two roles would be randomly assigned to the two subjects by a drawing, after which the learner was strapped into a chair to receive the shocks, and the teacher was brought into a control room with the researcher. Actually, no one was shocked, but the subjects believed they were hurting the other participant in the experiment. Most of us would assume that our friends and relatives would not do such a mean, dangerous thing.
