Stanley Milgram (1963)
He examined justifications for acts of genocide offered by those accused at the World War II, Nuremberg War Criminal trials. Their defense often was based on "obedience" - that they were just following orders of their superiors.
The experiments began in July 1961, a year after the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Milgram devised the experiment to answer the question "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?" (Milgram, 1974).
Milgram (1963) Obedience Experiment
Aim: Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. Stanley Milgram was interested in how easily ordinary people could be influenced into committing atrocities for example, Germans in WWII.
Procedure: Volunteers were recruited for a lab experiment investigating “learning” (re: ethics: deception). Participants were 40 males, aged between 20 and 50, whose jobs ranged from unskilled to professional. At the beginning of the experiment they were introduced to another participant, who was actually a confederate of the experimenter (Milgram). They drew straws to determine their roles – leaner or teacher – although this was fixed and the confederate always ended to the learner. There was also an “experimenter” dressed in a white lab coat, played by an actor (not Milgram).
The “learner” (Mr. Wallace) was strapped to a chair in another room with electrodes. After he has learned a list of word pairs given him to learn, the "teacher" tests him by naming a word and asking the learner to recall its partner/pair from a list of four possible choices.
The teacher is told to administer an electric shock every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. There were 30 switches on the shock generator marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock).
The learner gave mainly wrong answers (on purpose) and for each of these the teacher gave him an electric shock. When the teacher refused to administer a shock and turned to the experimenter for guidance, he was given the standard instruction /order (consisting of 4 prods):
Prod 1: please continue.
Prod 2: the experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4: you have no other choice but to continue.
Milgram (1963) Audio Clips 
Below you can also hear some of the audio clips taken from the video that was made of the experiment. Just click on the clips below. You will be asked to decide if you want to open the files from their current location or save them to disk. Choose to open them from their current location. Then press play and sit back and listen!
Clip 1: This is a long audio clip of the 3rd Pp administering shocks to the confederate. You can hear the confederate's pleas to be released and the experimenter's instructions to continue.
Clip 2: A short clip of the confederate refusing to continue with the experiment.
Clip 3: The confederate begins to complain of heart trouble.
Clip 4: Listen to the confederate get a shock: "Let me oughta here. Let me out, let me out, let me out" And so on!
Clip 5: The experimenter tells the Pp that they must continue.
Results: 65% (two-thirds) of participants (i.e. teachers) continued to the highest level of 450 volts.
Milgram did more than one experiment – he carried out 18 variations of his study. All he did was alter the situation (IV) to see how this affected obedience (DV).
Conclusion: Ordinary people are likely to follow orders given by an authority figure, even to the extent of killing an innocent human being. Obedience to authority is ingrained in us all from the way we are brought up. Obey parents, teachers, anyone in authority etc.
Milgram summed up in the article “The Perils of Obedience” (Milgram 1974), writing:
“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”
Factors Affecting Obedience
The Milgram (1963) experiment was carried out many times whereby Milgram varied the basic procedure (changed the IV). By doing this Milgram could identify which factors affected obedience (the DV). Obedience increased when:
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Status of Location
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Personal Responsibility
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Legitimacy of Authority Figure
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Status of Authority Figure
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Peer Support
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Proximity of Authority Figure
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Milgram's Agency Theory
During Milgram’s experiments, a number of participants pestered the experimenter to take responsibility for the situation. They typically asked, “who is going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?” They were determined to absolve themselves of any personal responsibility and to see themselves as simply carrying out orders from a higher authority. Milgram called this “being another person’s agent”, a situation known as the agentic state.
Milgram's agency theory states that people operate on two levels:
• as autonomous (i.e. independent) individuals, behaving voluntarily and aware of the consequences of their actions
• on the agentic level, seeing themselves as the agents of others and not responsible for their actions.
Milgram believed that this explained the behaviour of the participants in his study; they denied personal responsibility, claiming that they were merely "doing what they were told".
The consequence of moving from the autonomous to the agentic level (known as the agentic shift) is that individuals attribute responsibility for their actions to the person in authority. At this agentic level, Milgram argued, people mindlessly accept the orders of the person seen as responsible in the situation. Milgram believed that this explained the behaviour of the participants in his study; they denied personal responsibility, claiming that they were merely "doing what they were told". You probably know that when those responsible for atrocities during World War II were asked why they did what they did, their answer was simply: "I was only obeying orders". Indeed, Adolf Eichmann is a classic 'real life' example of this in so far as at his war trial he pleaded, like other Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, that he was only obeying orders. In fact, he claimed, he was not the 'monster' the media of the day had painted him to be.
In Hofling’s hospital experiment, personal responsibility was partly removed from the nurses. The doctor promised to sign the authorisation papers when he arrived at the hospital ten minutes after his phone call.
There is considerable evidence both from experiments and real life that the removal of personal responsibility encourages obedience. This is seen most vividly in the Nazi war crimes and the My Lai massacre.
Milgram PDF Downloads 
Obedience Audio Broadcast
Listen to a historic Reith Lecture: Bertrand Russell - 1948 Authority And The Individual