Stanley Milgram wanted to see exactly how far people would go when ordered by an authority figure to cause physical pain to another. In the 1960s, he gathered some volunteers and told them that he was conducting a study about the effect of punishment on learning. The volunteers would be the ‘teachers’, and they would be testing a ‘learner’ (actually an accomplice of Milgram’s) on his memory of word pairs. Every time the learner made a mistake, the teachers were told to administer an electric shock, and to increase the intensity of the shock each time. I guess the fact that the learner was sitting in an electric chair with a maximum capability of 450 volt shocks (enough to leave you completely fried and/or dead) didn’t ring any alarm bells, since the experiment was conducted at the esteemed Yale University.
The learner gave mostly incorrect answers on purpose, and was ‘shocked’ accordingly by the teacher (note that the learner was not actually shocked, but he managed to convince the teachers that he wasn’t acting). The learner would eventually scream in pain, plead with the teacher to stop, bang on the wall demanding release, and even complain of a heart condition. When the teachers expressed confusion or hesitation, the experimenter instructed them that they had no choice but to continue. The teachers became agitated, distraught, and angry, yet they continued to press the button despite the learner’s perfectly audible and agonised cries, sometimes laughing hysterically as they did so. At 300 volts, the learner would fall into an eerie silence, feigning death. Disturbingly, this resulted in an almost 100% compliance in continuing to deliver shocks up to the maximum 450 volts.
In the end, 26 of the 40 teachers delivered shocks of 450 volts; only 14 of them stopped before this point. Milgram had initially thought that only approximately three percent of people would deliver the maximum shock, when in actuality the study suggested that 65% of us would.
To be fair, there was a scientific reason for the experiment. Milgram conducted it to see if the killings and atrocities committed by Germans during WWII were down to genuine malice, or were attributed to obedience to authority figures. In the process he revealed a dark aspect of human nature: that many of us would be capable of killing someone under the obedience of authority.