In 1963 Stanley Milgram set out to investigate the nature of obedience in order to understand the inhumane acts committed by the Nazis in Hitlers Germany; acts which were made possible by obedience on a grand scale. In experimental conditions he set out to see if subjects would administer electric shocks to another person simply because they were told to do so.
He selected 40 males between 20 and 40 years of age, obtained by a newspaper advertisement asking for volunteers for a study on learning and memory, they would be paid $4.50 for agreeing to take part. The experiment…(short extract)