What do Milgram’s so-called ‘obedience studies’ tell us? When we ask that of people, we nearly always get the same answer: ‘They show that people will automatically obey orders from an authority figure, no matter how extreme.’ Were you about to say something similar? If so you, like most people, would have been wrong. Seriously wrong. So let us go back and look at what actually happened in those studies in New Haven Connecticut just over 50 years ago.
A man sits in front of a huge, imposing machine covered in an array of switches. He thinks his task is to act as ‘teacher’ in a memory study. Each time the learner makes an error, he has to administer an electric shock by depressing one of the switches. The level of shock rises relentlessly all the way to 450 volts.
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