That pleasure, in turn, may be one of the chief causes of the psychological phenomena of obedience.
The Actual.
Milgram carried out studies on obedience to authority at Yale from 1960-1963 (Obedience, xv). There were many variations of his experiment (to examine what can effect the authority of a command, and to demonstrate that the study observed the effects of willing obedience and not some other, hidden phenomena), but the control version (called Experiment 2) progressed as follows. The subject believes he meets the experimenter and another subject for a study on punishment and learning, which the experimenter describes in detail. The second subject is actually an actor and accomplice of the experimenter. A rigged drawing "randomly- assigns the position of teacher' to the subject and learner' to the accomplice. The experimenter brings the learner into a room, straps him into a chair "to prevent excessive movement-, and attaches electrodes to his wrists with an electrode paste "to prevent blisters and burns."" The learner is to memorize word pairs, and will be shocked each time he is unable to remember a pair correctly during multiple-choice quizzes. He registers his responses through a four-switch control panel (Obedience, 16-20).
The experimenter then shows the teacher to a "shock generator,"" a device with a row of 30 switches and corresponding lights, and labels ranging from "Slight Shock "15 volts- on one end to "Extreme Intensity Shock "315 volts- and further on to "Danger: Severe Shock "375 volts- near the other end. The final two switches, 435 and 450 volts, were simply labeled "XXX- (Obedience, 28). The teacher is to quiz the learner on the word pairs, then respond "correct- or "incorrect."" If incorrect, the teacher states the correct word, and delivers a shock to the learner, beginning at the lowest level on the far left for the first incorrect response, and moving one switch to the right for each subsequent incorrect response (Obedience, 20-21).
