of the shocks stuns you into near paralysis. You can no longer cry out,
no longer struggle. You can only feel each terrible electric bite. Perhaps,
you think, this total inactivity will cause the Teacher to stop. There can
be no reason to continue this experiment. But he proceeds relentlessly,
calling out the test questions, announcing the horrid shock levels (about
400 volts now), and pulling the levers. What must this man be like? you
wonder in confusion. Why doesn’t he help me? Why won’t he stop?
For most of us, the above scenario reads like a bad dream. To recog-
nize how nightmarish it is, though, we should understand that in most
respects it is real. There was such an experiment—actually, a whole
series—run by a psychology professor named Milgram in which parti-
cipants in the Teacher role were willing to deliver continued, intense,
and dangerous levels of shock to a kicking, screeching, pleading other
person. Only one major aspect of the experiment was not genuine. No
real shock was delivered; the Learner, the victim who repeatedly cried
out in agony for mercy and release, was not a true subject but an actor
who only pretended to be shocked. The actual purpose of Milgram’s
study, then, had nothing to do with the effects of punishment on
learning and memory. Rather, it involved an entirely different question:
When it is their job, how much suffering will ordinary people be willing
to inflict on an entirely innocent other person?
The answer is most unsettling. Under circumstances mirroring pre-
cisely the features of the “bad dream,” the typical Teacher was willing
to deliver as much pain as was available to give. Rather than yield to
the pleas of the victim, about two thirds of the subjects in Milgram’s
experiment pulled every one of the thirty shock switches in front of
them and continued to engage the last switch (450 volts) until the re-
searcher ended the experiment. More alarming still, not one of the forty
subjects in this study quit his job as Teacher when the victim first began
to demand his release; nor later, when he began to beg for it; nor even
later, when his reaction to each shock had become, in Milgram’s words,
“definitely an agonized scream.” Not until the 300-volt shock had been
sent and the victim had “shouted in desperation that he would no longer
provide answers to the memory test” did anyone stop—and even then,
it was a distinct minority who did.
These results surprised everyone associated with the project, Milgram
included. In fact, before the study began, he asked groups of colleagues,
graduate students, and psychology majors at Yale University (where
the experiment was performed) to read a copy of the experimental
procedures and estimate how many subjects would go all the way to
the last (450-volt) shock. Invariably, the answers fell in the 1 to 2 percent
range. A separate group of thirty-nine psychiatrists predicted that only
Robert B. Cialdini Ph.D / 159