Questioning Authority: A Rethinking of the Infamous Milgram Experiments

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on February 12, 2009, Printed on February 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/126492/

Between 1963 and 1974, Dr. Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments that would become one of the most famous social psychology studies of the 20th century. His focus was how average people respond to authority, and what he revealed stunned and disturbed people the world over.

Under the pretense of an experiment on "learning" and "memory," Milgram placed test subjects in a lab rigged with fake gadgetry, where a man in a lab coat instructed them to administer electrical shocks to a fellow test subject (actually an actor) seated in another room in "a kind of miniature electric chair."