14 DAY TRIAL // Perhaps not many of you know that, when told so by a professional person with enough authority, you could even kill another human being in the name of science. This was demonstrated decades ago by a terrible study on authoritarianism. The real victims of the test, the participants, were definitely affected for life by the experiment they took part in, which was performed almost half a century ago and was led by a young Yale researcher in psychology, Stanley Milgram.
It was 3 months after trial of Adolf Eichmann, the famous Nazi war criminal, when Milgram asked himself, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?” So, Milgram developed his research in order to answer this question related to human behavior, namely to what lengths we can go when ordered around by a person of authority. Basically, the experiment involved that the 40 participants (Yale locals) follow his orders in what they were told was a pain test.
They were required to assist him in administering 450-volt shocks to his “subjects.” In reality, the machine allowing them to “shock” the “victims,” as well as the shocking device in itself, was totally fake, while the subjects of the “pain test” were, in fact, actors. Surprisingly, Milgram's white coat and his insisting that he was a doctor and that he knew what he was doing were enough to convince people to turn the button to killing voltages.
The actors faked horrible pain and sometimes even death. The findings of the study surprised everyone involved, from Milgram to the actors and the participants, since it was discovered that it took so little to convince someone to torture or kill a person if you appear to have the looks of an authority. 37 of the 40 participants obeyed his orders, although some of them protested at first. Nevertheless, the outcome of the study, although fake and marked by questionable ethics, changed the lives of most of the subjects forever. Some of them are now volunteers in human rights programs.