Hey, this was just post World War that's not bad.
And they were looking for ordinary people: factory workers, business men,
professional people, telephone workers, white collar workers.
Basically anybody between the age of 20 and 50 not including high school and
college students, kind of interesting. So they were, he was looking for standard
people from the community. Alright, what did he then do them, well
you, you were introduced to that notion of a confederate in the last Lecturing,
confederate will play a role here too because we're really going to have three
characters playing a role each time, and of course Milgram repeated this
experiment over and over again with other players.
It was always him ass the experimenter, then there was the confederate that we're
going to call the learner. And then there was the reals subject that
we're going to call the teacher. But from the teacher's perspective, they
arrived at the lab, and they arrived at about the same time as another
individual. This other individual said they had also
answered this ad. So again, to the teacher's perspective
they were both participants, arriving in a lab to do an experiment.
Very early in the experiment, Stanley Milgram repeated some of these issues,
that this will be an experiment about memory, and learning.
And he said one of you will play the role of teacher.
One of you will play the role of learner, and let's flip a coin, or draw straws, or
do something random-looking to decide who is which.
But that part was rigged. So the real subject was always made the
teacher and the confederate was always made the learner.
Now, what, the way Stanley said this was going to work, is that they were going to
be assessing the power of electric shock to enhance learning.
That's right, electric shock. early on in the experiment, they brought
both subjects, but especially the learner, into a separate room, and they
sat in front of a terminal that had some buttons, so that they could indicate
responses. And an electrical current was hooked up
to them. The real teacher was allowed to feel the
electrical current too, to get a sense of what a very light current felt like.
which was just, you know, kind of uncomfortable, kind of like if you stick
your tongue on a battery. You do that, right?
so that kind of, you know, eww, kind of feels uncomfortable, but not painful.
but that was the latest current. I'll get to that in a moment.
They would come in, the learner would get all hooked up with this electrical
apparatus and then the teacher would come sit in a separate room where they could
speak to the learner, and they could hear the learner, but they couldn't actually
see the learner, at least not in the classic setup.
And the way things would work is that Stanley would give the teacher a set of
questions. The teacher was to ask each question, one
at a time, to the learner and give them multiple choices.
So it was a multiple choice type test. If the learner got it right, you could
proceed to the next question, but if the learner got it wrong.
>> Then two things happened. First, the teacher was to give them a bit
of a shock. Okay, press a button that delivered an
electrical shock to the learner. Second, they were also supposed to turn
up the amount of shock. So each time a person got an answer wrong
The amount of shock they experienced went up, and this would happen over the tests.
So every wrong answer, they get shocked, you turn up the current.
They get shocked, you turn up the current.
Now, in reality, no shocks were being delivered.
But the teacher didn't know that. they were given, let me just show you
this next apparatus, this sort of device to turn up the current.
And this device was labeled things like mild current, to medium, to strong, to
very strong, to high danger and it went up, you know, to really extreme-sounding
settings. Now, of course the, the subject had felt
the light one. This is just to give you a sense of what
it look alike when they were hooking up the student, again who was a confederate,
and the important thing was that Stanley Milgram himself was right there when the,
when the teacher, the subject, was doing the experiment.
The question was, the central question was, how far would they go.
Would this person keep going all the way to the end of the highest shock level?
Would they keep turning the shock up? and there were some added little bits to
the experiment to make it, I guess you'd say, even more interesting.
At some point, when they got to sort of the high mild shock.
The, the teacher would start. Sorry, the learner would start saying,
ow, that's really painful. That really hurts I don't want to do this
anymore. And Stanley Milgram would just tell the
teacher, just keep going. It's part of the experiment.
You, you know, you have to keep going. The experiment requires you to continue
and. If the subject continued.
If they went to higher and higher,then at some point the learner got even more
extreme. And they might say something like I don't
feel good. I don't want to do this.
Let me out. etc, and they would be pounding on the
wall at some point. But Stanley would say keep going, keep
going the experiment requires you to continue.
If the subject kept going, then at some point the learner would, in fact, shut
up. They wouldn't respond at all.
And what Milgrim would say is, no answer is a wrong answer.
So if they don't respond, shock them, and turn it up, ask the next question.
And keep going. >> Okay and Milgrum would just gently,
he wasn't yelling at them, he wasn't overbearing.
He was just telling them in a very authoritative way, you must continue.
And the question was how many of them would.
Now, Milgrum expected that not many of them would.
But let me show you some data. Let's look at the bottom bar here first.
If you do it in the original way, the way I just described to you, in fact a
startlingly large number of subjects, went to the maximum shock level.
Even though the learner complained, even though the learner banged on the wall,
even though the learner went silent. They kept going rich to the maximum
level, 65%, two out of three, now what does that tell us?
Well it tells us that us, if we took, you know, there's I don't know how many
people in this moot course still, now, but let's say there's ten thousand of us
still going strong, 20 thousand of us still going strong, then a full
two-thirds of us would have done that. Would that be me?
Would it be you? We don't know.
There was only a third that said no, I will not do this.
