Are We Evil?

During the Nuremberg trials, there was a lot of talk about the motives of the Nazi command and those underneath them. Repeatedly heard was the excuse that they were just following the orders of their superiors. However, public opinion was clearly against this. The people following the hearings dismissed the Nazi's as being evil to the core for the crimes that occurred during the Holocaust. No ordinary person could commit unspeakable crimes against humanity simply because they were told to, right? It was this question that Stanley Milgram sought to answer in his famous experiment in 1961.

Milgram designed an experiment that would put a person in "control" of another persons life while an authority figure tells them to harm the other person. Each experiment involved three people: the experimenter, a teacher, and a learner. The teacher was always a unsuspecting subject, while the experimenter ran the study and acted as an authority figure, and the learner was a confederate, or actor in in the experiment posing as a subject. The learner and the teacher and the learner were allowed to talk to each other while waiting for the experiment to start, and their roles "randomly" assigned.

The teacher (subject) would be led into a room with the experimenter, and the learner was led to the next room that was separated by a glass wall so that the learner and the teacher to see each other. The learner was strapped to a chair and fitted with electrodes that led to a machine in front of the teachers chair. The teacher was informed that this experiment was a test of people's memory in pressure situations. The teacher's job was to ask the learner questions; if the learner answered correctly, nothing would happen, and if the learner answered incorrectly or did not answer at all, the teacher would have to shock the learner through the machine in front of his chair. The machine had a series of switches ranging from 15-450 volts. Each time the learner answered incorrectly, the teacher would have to use a higher level of electricity. They were in 15volt increments, and above volts 75-120 was the label "Moderate," above 135-180 volts was the label "Strong," above 375-420 was the label "Danger: Severe Shock," and above the switches for 435 and 450 volts was that label "XXX."

Unbeknownst to the teacher was the fact that there was no actual shock that would occur, the machine would simply make a louder buzzing noise with each switch. The learner was in on the whole thing and pretend to be shocked. His reactions would get worse with each shock, eventually acting fearful and yelling about his heart condition. When the shocks reached the highest level, the learner would feign death. If the teacher wanted to stop the experiment, the experimenter would tell him to continue with increasingly forceful commands. The experimenter would tell the teacher to continue at most four times in a row before calling the experiment off, otherwise, the teacher would have to shock the learner 3 times at the highest voltage before the experiment ended.

The results were frightening. All 40 of the "teachers" obeyed up to 300 volts, while 25 of the 40 continued on to the end of the experiment. Sixty-five percent of the "ordinary people" who participated continued to shock another person even after they became unresponsive simply because a person with authority told them to continue.

Works Cited:

Experiment Resources (2008). http://www.experiment-resources.com/stanley-milgram-experiment.html Retrieved April 27^th, 2010