In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment on obedience to authority. His findings immediately stunned the scientific community and beyond. People asked, how was it possible that fully two-thirds of the apparently normal adults who participated in Milgram’s study had followed the orders of the experimenter (a technician ostensibly in charge of running a study on memory and learning) to the point of repeatedly inflicting severe electric shocks on a learner who was trying unsuccessfully to memorize a list of 30 pairs of words? Could people really be so willing to obey the orders of an authority figure no matter what the consequences might be for their fellow human beings?
Modigliani et al. (Thu,) studied this question.