Obey at any Cost
... recruited through ads and mail. The subjects were paid $4.50 so that they would not act in a certain way because they were afraid of not being paid. A confederate was included in the experiment acting as a subject. Also, there was another actor posing as an experimenter. The experimenter told the real subjects that the experiment was a study on the effect of punishment on learning. The subjects drew a piece of paper from a hat to determine who would be teaching and who would be learning. But it was rigged so that the real subject always became the teacher. The leaner was taken into the next room and put in a chair with electrodes attached to him. The electrodes were wired up to the shock generator. Even though the learner’s arms were pinned down, he could still reach an answer pad with the choices of a, b, c, and d on it. He was supposed to answer questions asked by the teacher (subject). The learning task was to let the learner memorize connections between pairs of words. The teacher would read a list of word pairs and test the learner’s memory of the pairs of words. Every time the learner answered the question wrong, the teacher was told by the experimenter to administer a shock to the learner. The subject did not know that he was not actually shocking the learner. The learner had to act and sound like he was being shocked though. His reactions got worse every time he answered a question wrong. He would even mention that his heart was bothering him. At 300 volts, the learner pounded on the walls and demanded to be taken out of the experiment instantly. But the experimenter commanded the subject to continue, that continuing was necessary to complete the experiment. After 300 volts were given, the learner stopped answering the questions. The experimenter was told that this should be counted as an incorrect answer and to administer another electrical shock. Many subjects complained about going on and were concerned about the learner’s condition. Stanley Milgram asked some psychology majors at Yale University to predict how high the subjects would go. They predicted 1.2% would go up the scale all the way. Surprisingly Milgram found out that 65% or 26 of the 40 total subjects went the whole way. Milgram was concerned that the subjects might suffer from psychological suffering. He explained what the experiment was for, what rea...