TLDR:
The milgram experiment was a social experiment conducted in 1961, in which participants were led to believe that they would take part in an unrelated experiment and where instructed by an authoritative person (researcher) to administer electric shocks to a third person (learner). These shocks would gradually increase in strength and eventually would have been lethal, if they had been real. Although many participants hesitated, all participants continued to administer 300 Volts and 65% administered the highest dosage of 450 Volt. Following the tragedy in World War II, this experiment was to research the conflict between obedience towards authority and personal conscience.
Classroom of the elite s2 ep3
My flatmate did tell me about this experiment but i shortly forgot about it afterwards and didn’t remember until i saw a scene of the Anime Classroom of the Elite in season 2 episode 3. At the beginning of this episode, the protagonist Ayanokoji observes his classmate Karuizawa being bullied. Three girls accused her of having knocked over Rika, a fourth student at the scene. One of the three girls started to hit Karuizawa and told Rika to do the same. She hesitantly complied and hit Karuizawa in the face with a light slap. The three girls, not satisfied with that result instructed her to slap harder. Although at first unwilling, Rika gradually started to hit Karuizawa harder and harder and in the end even liked the torturing.
Implications
Milgram explains by suggesting, that there are two states of behaviour, when people are in a social situation. In the autonoumous state, people would take actions on their own and take responsible for the result of their action. In the agentic state, people would allow others to direct their action, executing their order and passing all responsibilities to the order given entity. For the latter state to come into effect, the order giving person has to be recognized as someone legitimate and qualified to direct others and has to be believed to accept full responsibility for the outcome.
Experiment Variations
In total experiments have been conducted on 18 different variational situations. Such variations included that the researcher was called out after the experiment began, a different more run down location was used to conduct the experiment, instructions have been communicated through a phone or conducting the experiment in a group setup where other participants ( belonging to the research team) disobeyed and stopped administer shocks at given voltage levels.
Caveats
Overall 636 american men participated in this study (transferable to female? representative for other countries/cultures?).
Participants might have not fully believed the experiment setupd
References
McLeod, S. A. (2017, Febuary 05). The milgram shock experiment. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
Milgram experiment. (2022, September 11).. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Milgram_experiment&oldid=1109718874
