In 1961, a young assistant professor at Yale conducted what some say was the most important psychological experiment of all time. Stanley Milgram wanted to test the limits of authority in a supposedly civilized country to see just how much cruelty would average people inflict on their fellow citizens just because they were told to. In the famous electroshock experiment, 65 percent of the volunteers — some of them clean-cut Yale men — believed they were torturing Milgram’s test subjects, and did so just because a man in a lab coat told them to. The famous experiment is still Exhibit A in every college psychology course. But what did it prove?
Guests:
Dr. Alan Elms, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis. He was Milgram’s research assistant during his 1961 study on obedience
Dr. Thomas Blass, Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland and author of the upcoming biography “The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram”
Lauren Slater, psychologist and author of the upcoming book “Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century.”