The Milgram Experiment

Not to dwell on that 'Law & Order' episode, but I looked up something on Wikipedia about the basis for that episode. Robin William's character based his actions on an actual famous experiment that was conducted by a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in the 1960s which observed how far human subjects would go in harming another person when instructed to do so by an authority figure (who in this case, was the researcher conducting the experiment). He found that the majority of people tested would continue to torture (via electro-shock) another person, despite their better judgement, at the command of the researcher. The experiment was prompted by the Nazi war crime trials, in which Eichmann and his minions claimed that they were "just following orders" in carrying out the Holocaust. That's a pretty scary thought when you think about how any of us, when put in that position, may carry out reprehensible acts of evil at the command of another. I can totally see the possibility of that from my own 11 1/2 years of military experience - and I was only a dental officer!! Hey, anybody remember Abu Ghraib?

Here's more details, directly from Wiki, on how the experiment was conducted:


"The experimenter (E) orders the teacher (T), the subject of the experiment, to give what the subject believes are painful electric shocks to a learner (L), who is actually an actor and confederate. The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks, but in reality there were no shocks. Being separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level."

It's funny that I am just now learning about this, because there was also mention of it in that "Enron" movie I watched the other day. You learn something new everyday! Incidentally, one of the opening scenes from "Ghostbusters" shows Bill Murray's character conducting a derivative of this experiment (in an attempt to impress a girl!).