Milgram Obedience Paradigm

The Milgram obedience paradigm, devised by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, measures the extent to which ordinary people will obey an authority figure's commands to harm another person. A naive participant is assigned the role of teacher and instructed by an experimenter to administer increasingly severe electric shocks to a learner (a confederate) for errors on a memory task, with a switchboard labeled up to 450 volts and ominous warnings. No real shocks are delivered, but the participant believes they are, and the learner's scripted protests escalate to screams, then silence. When participants hesitate, the experimenter issues standardized prods to continue. Milgram found that a majority of participants obeyed to the maximum voltage despite visible distress, a result that overturned assumptions about individual conscience and became one of the most influential and controversial demonstrations in the history of psychology.