In 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to conduct a series of experiments to clarify a question: how much suffering are ordinary people willing to inflict on others, completely innocent people, if such infliction of pain is part of their job duties? He wanted to understand how the residents of Germany during the years of Nazism could have participated in the destruction of millions of innocent people in concentration camps.
The essence of Milgram’s experiment is that participants are assigned the role of the teacher (in reality, they think they receive this role by lot, but everything is arranged so that a plant actor always becomes the student). Then the “teacher” goes into another room, sits at a table before a high-voltage device, and reads a list of associative word pairs to the “student,” which the student was supposed to memorize. If the student did not memorize the words and subsequently gave a wrong answer to the teacher’s question, the teacher was to use the device to deliver an electric shock to the student. Starting from 15 volts, with each new error, he was to increase the shock in increments of 15 volts up to a maximum of 450 volts, after which he was to continue using the maximum shock. Of course, the actor playing the student received no shock, but only pretended to receive it and experience pain. In different variations of the experiment, the student and teacher were separated either by a soundproof wall (meaning the teacher could only hear the student knocking on the wall), or by an ordinary wall (meaning he could hear screams, pleas to stop, and complaints about supposed heart problems).
As for the results, for example, one series of trials showed that 26 out of 40 subjects (65%) increased the voltage to 450 volts and did not stop delivering electric shocks until the researcher gave the order to end the experiment. And only 5 subjects (12.5%) stopped at a voltage of 300 volts when the victims showed the first signs of distress. Replications of the experiment under different conditions and with different people showed approximately the same results.
What does this mean—that most people are indeed ready to discard all humanity and inflict pain, or even harm, on other people simply by the order of an authority? If we look at the data from Milgram’s experiment that were not published, it is easy to see that this is not the case at all. By analyzing data from 656 post-experimental questionnaires, researchers found that 56% of participants actually stopped the experiment at one point or another because they believed the person behind the wall was truly experiencing pain. Another study, examining 91 interviews conducted immediately after the experiments, showed that among the 46 participants who continued the experiment after the victim’s distress, 33 participants (72%) did so simply because they did not believe that the victim was actually being caused pain (which was indeed the case—the victim-actors only simulated it).
In total, we find that about 86-88% of Milgram’s experiment participants actually either stopped their participation as soon as it seemed to them that they were truly causing the victim pain, or continued only because they did not believe in the authenticity of the experiment and the victim’s pain. These conclusions, based on unpublished data, do not align with the results that were demonstrated in the original studies and shown to a wide audience. Perhaps the methodology of the experiment itself has nothing to be criticized, but the results were clearly cherry-picked to suit the views of the experimenters. An ordinary person cannot be forced to harm others simply by an order from above. And the multi-million victims of Nazism are the result only of the passive acceptance of the regime by the majority of people, while the acts of violence themselves were committed by a minority of security agents working directly for the Nazi state.
