Obedience to Authority

Between August 1961 and May 1962, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram (1963, 1965, 1974) conducted a series of investigations on the psychology of obedience. Under the guise of a learning experiment, participants were placed in a situation in which they were instructed to deliver what they thought were increasingly painful and dangerous electric shocks to another individual. The point of the studies was to see how long participants would follow the experimenter's instructions before they refused to administer any more shocks. Milgram found that the average person continued to shock the innocent victim far longer than anyone had anticipated. The findings have implications for the worst of human behavior, including massacres, atrocities, and genocide. Keywords: agentic state; authority; fundamental attribution error; milgram; obedience