To the right you can view a video of several conformity/obedience studies. It appears to have been cleverly hacked, to include footage of the collapse of the World Trade Center.

Stanley Milgram's (1963) study on obedience is one of the most well known studies within the discipline of psychology and illustrates the way in which even the most ordinary and well-meaning individuals can be lead to commit horrible deeds under the watchful and demanding presence of an authority figure.

Basic Study Design:

• Participants were recruited to partake in an experiment on learning behavior in which they were told they would be randomly assigned to either the "teacher" or the "learner" role.
  
  
• A confederate always played the role of the "learner" and pretended to answer questions incorrectly in order to require the participant to administer a series of progressively more painful and serious shocks using a series of switches on a fake machine.
  
  
• As the shocks increase the confederate "learner" cries out in pain, complains of a heart condition and demands to be let out of the experiment.
  
  
• Meanwhile the experimenter informs the participant that they must continue to administer the shocks and ignore the protests of the confederate and participants must decide whether or not to continue to administer the shocks not only after the confederate begins to cry out in pain, but even after the confederate falls silent and is possibly believed to be dead...
  

Milgram initially designed his study to better understand the reasons behind some of the atrocities of Nazi Germany during WWII and to investigate the role that obedience to authority may have played in the situation. In particular, he had been closely following the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and since his parents had been refugees during WWII it seemed only natural that Milgram began to wonder if it was possible that the events of the Holocaust may simply have been the result of individuals like Eichmann simply following orders... Before beginning the study he surveyed several well-known psychologists both within his school and across the nation and after describing the basic design of the study asked them to preduct how many individuals would administer shocks all the way to 450v. limit of the machine, early estimates were that only about 3% of the population would be sadistic enough to administer shocks to this most extreme level.

Yet, at the conclusion of Milgram's experiment he was shocked to discover that as many as 66% of the participants in the study actually went all the way to the 450v. level, even after the confederate had stopped talking completely.


To watch a more recent version of the Milgram study you can also check out this clip of a British version (with Derren Brown) of the study...


Another evil side of Milgrim's experiment was that he
had deceived the participants of the experiment. They were intially told that they would be taking part in a study that would help test memory rather than a study testing obedience.

Reference: Milgram, Stanley (1963). "Behavioral study of obedience". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378.