72. People Obey Authority Figures
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram (1963) performed experiments on the psychology of obedience. Participants in the study thought they were engaged in an experiment on learning and punishments. They were asked to administer shocks to someone in another room if that person answered questions incorrectly. In fact, the person in the other room was part of the experiment and wasn’t receiving shocks at all.
Every time the “learner” answered a question incorrectly, the participants were asked to increase the level of shock voltage. The participants couldn’t see the learner, but they could hear them making noise every time they received a shock. As the voltage was increased, the learner made more and more noise, eventually ...
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