Milgram's Experiment on Obedience to Authoirty

In this experiment, Milgram wanted to know how far a human being would go if he/she was ordered to harm another human being. He was interested in how the Germans in World War II were capable of killing millions of people, most claiming that they just followed orders. To test how obedience affected people's behaviors, he set up an experiment. The participant was given the role of being the "teacher" while the other person, who is actually a confederate (an actor), was given the role of being the student. While the "student" was strapped to a chair in a separate room, the experimenter told the participant that he/she was to ask the "student" a set of questions. For every wrong answer, the participant would press a lever to deliver shocks of progressively higher voltages to the student. The voltage ranged from 15 volts to 450 volts, which is high enough to kill a person. When reaching high voltages, the actor was told to scream in agony and plead the participant to stop. When the participant reached the deadly 450 volts, the actor was told to be ominously silent, as if he/she was dead. In reality, no shocks were actually delivered, but participants were not informed of this until the end of the experiment. Many participants considered stopping, but when urged by the experimenter in the room to continue, many continued. Theoretically, the experimenters predicted that most participants would stop the experiment before reaching the dangerous amount of voltage. Surprisingly, 63% of the participants were obedient enough to continue til the end.

To see this experiment in more detail, click here

part two
Part three
In the recent remake of this experiment, which took place in 2009, twelve participants are only told that they are involved in a simple memory test, not being aware of the real goal of the experiment. Both the student and the professor who's in charge of the experiment are actors. The experiment took place in UK, as a part of a BBC program called "How violent are you?"(video above) When the results came out, psychologists were shocked to see that in 2009, nearly 48 years after the original experiment, large number of participants were still willing to obey the experimenter and continue til the end (out of 12 participants, only 3 refused to go on). There was another partial remake in 2006 by Jerry M. Burger, who met all ethical needs of the experiment and received the approval from the IRB (Institutional Review Board). He found that even after meeting the ethical needs, the results were virtually identical to the original experiment that took place in 1961 (Wikipedia).

Sources: http://www.spring.org.uk, http://www.bbc.co.uk, www.wikipedia.com