Obedience

"Obedience is as basic an element in the structure of social like as one can point to. Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only man dwelling in isolation who is forced to respond, through defiance or submission, to the commands of others. Obedience, as a determinant of behavior, is of particular relevance to our time." -Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority



And so begins Milgram's report on his experiments on our obedience to authority. Stanley Milgram, a psychology professor at Yale University, became deeply interested in the Holocaust, writing, "Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency of the manufacture of appliances. these inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders" -Obedience to Authority. And so, in order to answer his own questions, he created a series of experiments, the first of which in July of 1961.
The experiment itself consisted of an experimenter (E), the test subject, who believed he was playing the teacher (T), an actor playing the role of the learner (L), and a generator with switches, starting at 15 volts, and increasing by 15 to 450 volts, accompanied by labels, warning from "slight shock" to "DANGER: severe shock". The "experimenter" was dressed in a white lab coat, representing the authority. The study claimed to be one on memory, and the "teacher" was instructed to read word choices to the "learner". If a wrong answer was given, a shock was administered, and for each wrong answer, the voltage increased by 15. The "learner" was in a different room, but could still be heard by the "teacher". Initially, the learner answers correctly, until he begins to give increasingly incorrect answers.
At around 75 volts, the teacher begins to hear whimpers and sounds from the learner. At 150 volts, the learner begins banging on the wall and screaming for the experiment to stop. Soon after follows pleads that he has a heart condition, that he's going to die. From 300 volts onward, the learner refused to answer anymore, and what is heard can only be described as an agonized scream. Throughout this, the experimenter continues to encourage the teacher. If the teacher refused, hes ordered to continue. If he continues to refuse, the experiment is halted.
Suddenly, at 345 volts, the screams stop. In fact, all sounds from the learner stop. The teacher is only told that silence counts as a wrong answer, and he must continue to electrocute the learner.
Thankfully, the learner being an actor, the screams were prerecorded, and there were no real shocks. The teacher, however, was unaware. Even so, Milgram found that nearly 70% of the teachers obeyed, administering up to 450 volts. In another version, Milgram has the learner in the same room as the teacher, and the learner is electrocuted through touching a shock plate. When he refuses the continue, the teacher is ordered to grab his hand and physically force him to touch the plate. Even more hauntingly, 30% of the teachers still administered the full voltage.

Why is it that they followed what they thought to be authority so blindly? Later interviews revealed that they had taken the blame off of themselves, placing in on the experimenter, claiming it was his fault, that they had been forced. But when it really comes down to it, whose hand flipped the switch?