The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures were a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram.
Milgram’s finding horrified America. They showed that decent Americans citizens were as capable of committing acts against their conscience as the Germans have been under the Nazis.
They measured the willingness of study participants, men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner”. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
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