The Milgram experiment
series of social psychology experiments, studying obedience to authority figures
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The Milgram experiment was a series of studies in the 1960s that tested how far people would go in obeying orders from an authority figure, even when asked to harm another person. The results were disturbing—many participants continued inflicting what they believed were painful electric shocks on someone else simply because a scientist told them to—which revealed troubling insights about human obedience and raised important ethical questions about the limits of what researchers should ask people to do.
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The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what T has been told are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. T is led to believe that (in following E's instructions) they are administering electric shocks as punishment for imperfect performance – though in reality there were no shocks. The putative "electro-shock generator" played pre-recorded exclamations of discomfort, progressing to screams and pleas for mercy as the "shock level" increased.
In the early 1960s, a series of social psychology experiments were conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been torturous had they been real.