Experimental background:
Participants range in age from 20 to 50, including all kinds of educational backgrounds from primary school graduation to doctoral degree. The experimental address is in a basement in the old campus of Yale University.
Experimental purposes:
In order to test the subjects, when the authority gives an order that goes against their conscience, how much refusal does human performance exert.
The most important comment caused by the experiment is not the ethical controversy of the experimental method, but the meaning represented by the experiment. A Yale University participant of 196 1 wrote in Jewish Trends magazine that when he wanted to stop to be a "teacher", he suspected that "the whole experiment might just be to test whether ordinary Americans would obey orders and violate their moral conscience-just like the Germans did during the Nazi period", which was one of the original intentions of the experiment.
In his book The Danger of Obedience, Meirgren said: "The question we are facing is how the environment we created in the laboratory to make people obey power is related to the Nazi era that we deplore."
That's Stanley milgram's "electric shock experiment". Among social psychology majors, milgram's "Electric Shock Experiment" and zimbardo's "Stanford Prison Experiment" are the two most cited experiments, the most well-known research and the most controversial ones.