The Milgram experiment
Stanley Milgram · 1963
In a famous psychology experiment, a scientist asks ordinary volunteers to inflict ever-stronger electric shocks on a stranger each time he answers wrong, in the name of a study on learning. The stranger, an actor, cries out, pleads, then falls silent. Despite their visible distress, most volunteers obey up to the level marked "danger: severe shock", simply because a lab coat keeps repeating: "The experiment requires that you continue."
What does this obedience teach us about human beings?
What it does in the debate
Objects to Anthropological optimismattacks the position
Ordinary people inflict the worst on a mere order, without hatred or grievance: if man were naturally good and only corrupted by an unjust society, how is it that he obeys so readily?
- Ordinary volunteers, neither monsters nor wretches, inflict what they believe to be dangerous shocks on the mere order of an experimenter.
- They do so without hatred, without grievance, without personal gain, in a peaceful setting where no inequality or misery drives them to it.
- If man were good by nature and only corrupted by an unjust society, whence would come his obeying so readily an order to harm? The disposition to do evil is closer to the surface than optimism admits.
Therefore So primal goodness is not so assured: neither misery nor injustice is needed for the ordinary man to do the worst, a mere authority suffices.