Stanley Milgram

One psychologist I learned about in a previous course was Stanley Milgram. Milgram was a psychologist at Yale who conducted a famous experiment on obediance that I found intriguing. Participants recruited for the study were given the role of "teachers" who were tasked with adminstering shocks to confederates playing the role of "learners" whenever they answered a question wrong. The shocks were not actually administered, but the learners would act as though they were actually being shocked. Participants were directed to adminster increasingly high voltage shocks for every wrong answer, up to rather dangerous levels of electric shock. What's noteworthy about the experiment is that the majority of participants administered the most dangerous level of shocks rather than disobey the direction of the researcher, demonstrating the compelling power of authority on human behavior.