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insistent verbal prods. If the teacher continued the experiment, the learner’s pleas became more emphatic as well. After 150 volts, he was consistently to demand to be let out of the experiment. At 180 volts, labeled “very strong shock,” the learner was to cry out, “I can’t stand the pain.” At 270 volts, there was to be an agonized scream. After 300 volts, an “extreme intensity shock,” the learner refused to provide answers to the test, and the researcher insisted that a failure to answer should be considered a wrong answer and punished with a shock. At 315 volts, the learner violently shrieked and yelled again that he did not want to continue the test. After 330 volts, the learner was to act as if he had lost consciousness. The experimenter continued to insist that the test go on until all the shocks have been administered, all the way past “danger: severe shock” to the 435- and 450-volt switches that were labeled simply “XXX.”

If you were the teacher in such an experiment, how far do you think you would go before refusing to administer more shocks? Would you give any at all? Would you stop once the learner cried out that the shocks were getting painful? When he shouted his refusal to go on? When he refused to answer the questions? Or after he fell silent? Are you confident that you would maintain your refusal even if the researcher insisted that you had no choice?

Is there any way you could see yourself administering shocks at the top end of the board, where the labels indicate that you are inflicting severe pain—or worse—on an innocent volunteer?

Milgram wondered about this too, and he asked a number of people if and when they would stop the shocks.3 He explained the experiment to over a hundred college students, psychiatrists, and other middle-class adults. Every single one believed—as you and I believe—that they would stop the test at some point. Half said they would halt the shocks at 135 volts or below, soon after the learner started complaining about the pain. Only a handful predicted they would administer shocks above 210 volts, and no one thought they would continue past 300 volts, the point at which the learner refuses to provide any more answers. Milgram also asked people to predict what others would do. Most predicted that only a lunatic would administer the most severe shocks. The psychiatrists predicted that only one person in a thousand would obey the researcher all the way to the end.

Milgram’s experiments have become famous mostly because of their disturbing results. Everyone he questioned vastly underestimated the willingness of the teachers to shock the learners. More than 60 percent of the teachers were willing to obey the researcher all the way to the end, where they shocked the learner three separate times with 450 volts, labeled “XXX.”4 Of the fewer than 40 percent who refused at any point, half nevertheless administered shocks labeled “intense” or “extreme intensity.” In all, more than 80 percent of the teachers administered eight or more shocks of increasing severity even after the learner cried out in pain and demanded to be released from the experiment.

Milgram varied the experiments to see what would affect the willingness of teachers to administer the shocks. If the researcher left the room, the teacher was more willing to disobey his commands. The closer the victim was to the teacher, the less willing the teacher was to shock him.5 If the teacher was forced to administer the shocks by holding the learner’s hand to a plate of metal, the obedience level fell by half. Even so, almost a third of the teachers were willing to administer the highest shock on the board by physically forcing the learner’s hand to a shock plate.

One of the most significant results had to do with the impact of group pressure.6 In one version of the experiment, the teacher worked with two other teachers who were actually confederates of the researcher. One of the fake teachers read the word pairs; the other said whether it was correct. The one teacher not in on the ruse—the real subject of the experiment—was to administer