People Will Torture Others If Ordered by Authority Figures

In a replicated experiment, scientists discovered the fact that people were very likely to continue administering electric shocks to other people, if they were told to do so by an authoritarian figure. The first conclusion of this kind belonged to an experiment conducted in 1961 by Professor Stanley Milgram, of Yale University, but since then, it was deemed that such studies had a very damaging effect on the mind of the volunteers and were discontinued, due to ethical reasons.

However, in the new study, researchers from Santa Clara University in California discovered that people were still very prone to torturing others if they knew they could get away with it. Jerry Burger, the scientist who led the current tests, said in a phone interview to Reuters that the conclusions he and his team came to were “surprising and disappointing.”

"When you hear the man scream and say, 'let me out, I can't stand it,' that is the point when the real stress that people criticized Milgram for kicked in," said Burger, referring to the fact that no one in the scientific community dared to replicate this type of studies since then.

Volunteers were asked to “electrocute” an actor, at various intensities, while the actor “screamed” in pain. Although the maximum allowed limit for the current was 150 volts, the research team found with sadness that some 70 percent of all people who participated were inclined to use even more volts than they were allowed to, if the leader of the study asked them to, although they had no personal reason to do so.

"Although one must be cautious when making the leap from laboratory studies to complex social behaviors such as genocide, understanding the social psychological factors that contribute to people acting in unexpected and unsettling ways is important. It is not that there is something wrong with the people. The idea has been somehow there was this characteristic that people had back in the early 1960s that they were somehow more prone to obedience," Burger concluded.