“GET ME OUT OF HERE. I TOLD YOU I HAD HEART TROUBLE. GET ME OUT OF HERE… PLEASE!”
ACCOMPANIES THE BBC RADIO 4 PROGRAMME THE SCIENCE OF EVIL
“Incorrect. 150 volts.”
If you were instructed to inflict pain on another person in the cause of an academic experiment, how far would you go? If that person was in agony, pleading with you to stop, would you persist nonetheless? That’s the question that Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram wanted to test.
The year is 1961. Milgram has lured subjects to his laboratory with the promise of $4 for an hour’s work. An advertisement claims that participants will assist in a study on memory. When a volunteer turns up, they’re joined by a second ‘volunteer’ and the two people draw lots to choose who’s to be the ‘learner’ and who the ‘teacher’. Unbeknown to the genuine volunteer, it’s all a setup. The genuine volunteer is given the role of teacher. The learner is an actor.
A man in a white lab coat explains how the experiment will proceed. The teacher will sit in one room, the learner (the actor) in a separate booth. The learner is strapped into a chair and hooked up to an electricity generator. In front of the teacher is a set of small switches. The teacher is told that his job (in this experiment it’s always a ‘he’)
