In the 1960s, Yale professor Stanley Milgram conducted his initial experiment to determine how much harm ordinary people would do to another person if directed and urged to do so by an authority. However, he claimed to his test subjects that he wanted to test the effect of pain and negative reinforcement on memory. A question that many people produce after learning about this experiment is how or why someone would do something like this?

Milgram's experiment was inspired in part by a desire to understand the behavior of citizens and soldiers of Nazi Germany. This experiment is probably the most famous example in defense of what happened to the soldiers of Nazi Germany by showing that if one is ordered to do something with immoral consequences; the moral responsibility belongs solely to the person giving the order, not the one following it.

In his experiment, the researcher administering the test told each volunteer that two subjects were needed for each test, one “teacher” and one “learner.” The learner would try to memorize a set of word pairs, and then attempt to match a word with its correspondent. Each time the learner answered wrong, the teacher would administer an

Some will argue that Milgram was not expecting the results that he did get, since many of his colleagues and students doubted whether many subjects would continue through to 450 volts. This is a weak argument, as this may explain why one or two subjects were allowed to suffer stress, but this does not explain why all forty subjects were allowed to suffer, or why Milgram repeated his experiment many times.

Milgram's experiment breaks several ethical guidelines. Milgram deceives his subjects by misinforming them about the true purpose of the experiment, and by making them believe they are administering real electric shocks to a real subject. We would have to balance any criticisms with a consideration as to the necessity of deception. The main problem is one of demand characteristics, whereby if a subject knows the true purpose of an experiment, the subject might behave differently.

So, why or how do we humans do such things? Milgram indicates that the subjects (1) became absorbed in pleasing the authority and doing their assignment just right, (2) denied their responsibility, "the experimenter was a Ph. D." or just like Adolf Eichmann, many of the subjects said, "I wouldn't have done it by myself, I was just doing what I was told," (3) started to believe that the experiment was vitally important and that the pursuit of truth is a "noble cause" (even though someone has to suffer), (4) blamed the victim, "he was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked," and, most importantly, (5) just couldn't bring themselves to act on their values and defy authority (Milgram 317-327).

Milgram stated at the start that

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