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Milgram believed that ordinary people would be capable of carrying out tasks such as shocking people to a lethal level if pressured by an authority figure.

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"Rethinking One of Psychology's Most Infamous Experiments"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/

"The Man Who Shocked The World"

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200203/the-man-who-shocked-the-world

"Replicating Milgram: Researcher Finds Most Will Administer Shocks to Others When Prodded by ‘Authority Figure’"

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2008/12/replicating-milgram.aspx

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Milgram Experiment - Big History NL (Video)

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Milgram Experiment - Big History NL (Video)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOYLCy5PVgM

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https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/rethinking-one-of-psychologys-most-infamous-experiments/384913/

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65% of the participants continued to the highest level (450 volts). All the participants continued to 300 volts.

"Milgram summed up in the article 'The Perils of Obedience' (Milgram 1974), writing:

'I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.'"

In other words, "ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being."

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"Milgram (1963) examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders from their superiors."

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"Milgram (1963) was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person.

Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities, for example, Germans in WWII."

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- 40 participants (all volunteers) were "paired with another person and they drew lots to determine their roles – learner or teacher – The draw was fixed so that the participant was always the teacher."

- The "teacher" and the "experimenter" (dressed in a lab coat) would go into a room with an electric shock generator and the "learner" would go into a different room were he would be hooked up to an electric-shock machine.

- The "teacher" would then "read out strings of words to 'the learner'. Each time the learner made a mistake in repeating the words, the teacher was to deliver a shock of increasing intensity, starting at 15 volts and going all the way up to 450 volts."

- "When the teacher refused to administer a shock, the experimenter was to give a series of orders/prods to ensure they continued.

There were four prods and if one was not obeyed, then the "experimenter" read out the next prod, and so on.

Prod 1: Please continue.

Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.

Prod 4: You have no other choice but to continue.

(The shocks were not real. The "learner" was not harmed in any way and the screams had been pre-recorded, but the participants did not know this.)

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Stanley Milgram was a Jewish psychologist and professor at Yale University known for his experiment on obedience. He wanted to investigate if all the atrocities that had been commited during the Holocaust were a result of Germans' obedience to authority figures.

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“I should have been born into the German-speaking Jewish community of Prague in 1922 and died in a gas chamber some 20 years later,” he wrote in a letter to a friend in 1958. “How I came to be born in the Bronx Hospital, I’ll never quite understand."

“Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded; daily quotas of corpses were produced … These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only be carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of persons obeyed orders.”

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1. All the participants were male volunteers. (In total 636 participants were tested in 18 different variations of the experiment.)

2. It was unethical.

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No.

The participants were deceived. They were unaware that the experiment had been staged and that they were not shocking nor hurting anyone. They were also unaware of the fact that Milgram was investigating obedience rather than learning.

The participants were also not protected. They were exposed to "extremely stressful situations that may have the potential to cause psychological harm."

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Milgram did, however debrief the participants right after the experiment and "disclosed the true nature of the experiment."

He also pointed out that "although the right to withdraw was made partially difficult, it was possible as 35% of participants had chosen to withdraw."