Ben Wilson says:

I had a weird feeling this one would show up as number one.

Hannah says:

I think there are 2 things about this experiment that are definitely horrific.
1 is that it’s not “some” people but “most” people who are willing to suspend their moral code just because they’re asked to. The authority in this experiment isn’t someone with any real power in their lives. They weren’t threatened with consequences of any kind. No voices were raised. They were asked nicely to inflict pain, and they did.
2 is that they were thinking about it. This video shows some of it. The video I saw in psych class of the original experiment showed it better. They know what they’re doing is not right. You can see the indecision. People begin to sweat, to move restlessly, to rush through the questions as fast as possible, to get it over with. They want out. But most people aren’t willing to challenge the authority, flimsy though it is. More than that, it’s as if they don’t have the right to. As if having agreed to be involved, they have renounced their right to object and all responsibility for their own actions. As if the other participant, having agreed to be involved, had no right to object to potentially lethal pain.

If I recall correctly, the hypothesis Milgram was trying to prove was that the Holocaust was not carried out by monsters. It was masterminded by monsters, if you ask me. But the people carrying it out, doing the paperwork, making the millions of small decisions that were part the horror that was still reeling when this experiment was conducted were just ordinary paper pushers, doing what they were asked to do.

People are going to blindly do what some authority figure tells them to if they are condition to do so. This is because people by and large grew up in the Prussian education system. The U.S. public education system is precisely the same thing. It teaches people to be obedient rather than to think individually. If you don’t want your children to learn to think, send them to the government indoctrination camps. It will destroy their thinking to a certain extent.

jo says:

This experiment was sited in a documentary I was recently watching on the whole Enron scandal and how it related to the lower folks on the totem pole doing what the upper mucky mucks told them to do no matter how wrong it was. When you put millions of dollars in peoples faces they will do even the most horrific things to other people to get at the money. They even had recordings of the traders (not traitors) on the phone laughing about shutting down the power grids in California to have these planned black outs so as to jack up the prices for “grandpa”. It’s amazing what people will do to others just because they are told, but even more astounding what they will do for money.

Sally Hurford says:

I understand that this experiment was repeated but they substituted the humans ’students’ for puppy ’students’ in order to fully eliminate the doubt from the teachers minds that the students were acting. Most people happily electrocuted the puppies because thats what the man in the white coat with clipboard told them to do. Weird.

Nicolas J. says:

This is sickening! How could people do that? Just because someone told you to do something you did it? What kind of sick thing is that? Like my mom used to tell me “so if he told you to jump off a cliff would you do it?” I mean I believe that if someone told me to give someone deadly shocks i would stop. Most certanly aqfter they were in real pain! This is messed up!

I’ve seen stuff about this experiment a few times, most recently an episode of BBC’s Horizon called “How Violent Are you?” Turns out we’re a lot more violent than we think, and our brains are wired to make being violent an enjoyable experience for us, and the chemicals released are addictive, leading for some people to become chronically violent. We’re also prone to obey authority figures, like the scientist in the scenario.

I think in that context, such results shouldn’t really make us lose hope in humanity. It’s scary that most people administer the deadly shock, but at the same time if you consider that we’re hardwired towards violence and obedience to authority, the shocking part is that there are people who have strong enough moral standards as to where they don’t go through with it. We’d all like to think that in that situation we would stop the experiment, but without being placed in the experiment (without knowing about it) there’s really no way to know what you’d do. This experiment examines humanity at its most base level.

If I were there, I would probably trust the scientist and do it anyway. I mean, they’re scientist, in the 21st century…

Miriam says:

“Rather than taking the results of his experiment to his grave, Milgram published them so we could all share in the despair.”

not knowing is better?
REALLY?
what kind of person would rather not know about a personal flaw that may be hurting others just so they don’t have to experience personal discomfort? Yes there was trauma to the subjects, but that was never expected nor deliberately intended.

do you think that this experiment only applies to laboratories or specific areas of history? No. It applies and is ACTIVE in our daily lives.

Rather than have us not know he published the results so we would at least have a chance to not repeat the same horrible mistakes of history or set up checks and balances to prevent/lessen them.

You are not the only person who reads Cracked.com, or more specifically
http://www.cracked.com/article_16239_5-psychological-experiments-that-prove-humanity-doomed.html

You know… the one about the “5 Psychological Experiments?”