Leading with Vulnerability

15What We Got Wrong About Milgram's Experiment

One of the world's most famous psychology experiments was conducted by Stanley Milgram starting in the 1960s. The experiment was designed to test obedience and involved three participants. The first was the experimenter, who acted as the authority figure running the experiment. Next was the teacher, who was the subject of the experiment. Last, was the learner, who pretended to be another subject in the experiment, but in reality was an actor.

Here's how the experiment looked.

At the beginning of the experiment, volunteers were introduced to another participant (the actor) and they drew a sheet of paper to see who would play the role of the teacher or the learner. The truth was that both sheets of paper said the same thing on it and the actor would just lie and say he got the role of the learner, so each time the volunteer would be the teacher but they thought it was by chance.

After the roles were assigned the learner was taken into an adjacent room and strapped into something that looked like an electric chair.

The volunteer, aka the teacher, and the experimenter then went into another room where a switchboard was labeled with various switches, each designed to deliver an electric shock ranging from “slight shock” up to “danger: severe shock.” Before starting, the volunteer was given a very small shock so they could see that everything was indeed real. But, of course, no shocks were actually given to the learner in the other room ...