While the extermination camps of Nazi Germany bear no resemblance to a university laboratory, Milgram tried to maintain the essential elements of such extreme conditions during his experiments, and the scope of Milgram's studies leave researchers in wide agreement that his results are disturbingly generalizable.

lgram's experiments consisted of soliciting ordinary people to participate in a memory study. These people were brought to a laboratory setting where they were told they would be playing the role of a teacher. As a teacher, they would read a series of word pairs to another person, the learner, who was strapped to what looked like an electric chair behind a partition. The teacher's task was to test the learner's memory. Whenever the learner gave an incorrect response, the teacher was to administer an electric shock to the learner. The degree of these "shocks" could be controlled by levers labeled from 15 volts, a slight shock, to 450 volts, a severe and dangerous shock. The teachers were instructed by the experimenter to administer increasingly higher voltages to the learner with successive wrong answers.

In common experience, the objective need to disobey authority is relatively rare (except in the case of my two teenaged sons). For the vast array of everyday experiences, we know that obedience to authority is both innocuous and necessary. People are so well conditioned to follow orders that when faced with some unusual scenario (the Milgram scenario being a very extreme example) a practical dilemma occurs. In the Milgram experiments, the teachers wanted to satisfy their perceived responsibility to obey an authority figure. At the same time, however, the teachers wanted to satisfy their responsibility to the learners by not causing them harm. Hence, the dilemma. These teachers simply didn't know how to resolve these conflicting responsibilities. This conflict did cause the teachers intense negative feelings, but these feelings were resolved in favor of obedience to authority. The responsibility for harming the learners could at least be shifted to the authority figure, whereas disobedience to the authority figure was apparently much more difficult to justify.

The fact that the shocks were administered in a progressive way is also important. Once a person crosses the line of giving another person the low-voltage shocks, it is apparently easier to rationalize pushing the line through progressively more severe punishment. The stopping point becomes obscured for the teachers. By stopping, a teacher would have to realize that if there is any stopping

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