Obedience

Duration: 1600

Year Published: 1965

Complete Record: Presents an experiment conducted during 1962 at Yale University on obedience to authority. Describes both obedient and defiant reactions of subjects who are instructed to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to another person. Obedience documents the infamous "Milgram experiment" conducted at Yale University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person's deference to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible