The Milgram Experiment

The Milgram experiment is an experiment which portrays obedience to authority. In other words the experiment demonstrated that anyone who is dressed as a person of authority, such as a lab coat, uniform, or perhaps wearing a badge, can make a regular person do things he or she wouldn't regularly do. In the experiment there are three people involved. The first person is the figure of authority, who is dressed in a lab coat. The second and third person are supposively two people who have no idea what is going on and are participants in the experiment. In actuality of the two participants one of them is an actor and pretends he does not know what is going on, but the other participant doesn't know that. The man in the lab coat then sends the actor to a separate room and tells the participant to sit with him in his room. There he sits him in front of a machine and tells him to read some questions to the man in the other room and every time he gets a question wrong to press a button on the machine to deliver a shock to him. Every time a shock is delivered it increases by fifteen volts for the next shock. Whenever the participant delivered a shock he would hear the man in the other room scream, but in reality he was not receiving any shocks, he was screaming to make the participant think he was getting shocked because he is an actor. As the experiment progressed the actor would scream louder and louder and he begged the participant to stop the experiment, but the participant would keep the experiment running because the man in the lab coat would urge him too. In the end most of the participants who were chosen to have a part in the experiment made it to the final voltage increment, which was 450 volts, which is fatal, and all because the man in the lab coat told them to do so.