Obedience: Milgram's research

Milgram's original obedience study
Stanley Milgram (1963) sought an answer as to why the German population had followed the orders of Hitler during the Holocaust

Procedure
Milgram recruited 40 male partipcants through newspaper adverts. There was a rigged draw for each participant's role: a confederate 'Mr Wallace' always ended up as the learner whilst the participant was the teacher. There was also an experimenter, another confederate, dressed in a lab coat. Participants were told they could leave the study at any time.

The learner was strapped in a chair in another room and wired with electrodes. The teacher was required to give an increasingly severe electric shock each time the learner made a mistake on a learning task. The shocks were demonstrated to the teacher but thereafter the shocks were not real 

The shock level started at 15 and rose through 30…