This type of study came from people questioning what happened with the Nazi's. How did such a large mass of people just obey one man, Hitler? How did they just fall into their roles, regardless of their own morals?
The Milgram experiment: test subjects were told that they were participating in an experiment about Learning and Punishment. They were told to play the role of the "teacher", asking questions to the "learner" that was sitting in another room.
If the learner got a question wrong, the teacher was told to flip a switch that would administer a painful shock to them. The more questions were answered wrong, the higher the voltage of the shock to the learner would be.
Now the people in the experiment were all in on the fact that the real experiment was on Obedience, to see if the "teachers" would continue to administer powerful shocks when told to do so. From another room, the actors playing the learners would holler and even admit to having chest pains, and all the scientist overlooking the teacher's progress needed to do was prompt them, and they continued to deliver very high voltage shocks to the other person.
This was the sequence of the "prompts" given by the onlooking fake scientist:
"Please continue/go on"
"The experiment requires that you continue"
"It is absolutely essential that you continue"
"You have no other choice; you must continue"
Control was a big thing. They obeyed more when control seemed to be taken from them.
The scientist was the authority figure here. About 65% of the participants listened to the scientist throughout the experiment, even if they questioned if the other person was okay. What really led one participant to continue in the video we watched in my Social Psych class was that when the man told the scientist he didn't want another man's pain to be his fault, the scientist assured him,
"It would be my fault if anything happened, it would fall on me." Not you. So the guy continued, giving over 180 volts to the imaginary victim on the other end.
What was so controversial about this experiment was that the participants had to learn that they were capable of causing pain to another person, just because they were told to do so. To know you're capable of torturing another human being just because you're told to? That's some powerful stuff. We like to believe that we aren't capable of hurting others and that our morals will prevent that. Nope, doesn't work that way. Don't know until you're in a situation how you'll act.
In another class session, we saw a video in which people were asked how much money they would have to be offered to drown a puppy. Some people said a billion dollars, some said a couple of hundred. One very scary-looking girl said 50 cents. One lady they questioned said that she could never do it for any amount of money.
Then, the guys asking people how much it would take for them to do it came back with a live puppy, and asked the people again if they could still do it, and for how much. Most people were shocked, their answers changed to No, they could never do it, not even for a million dollars.
We are bad predictors of our own motivation...
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