Describe one study into obedience

Milgram’s study in 1963 aimed to explore the idea of obedience to see whether people would blindly follow orders from an authority figure. He gathered 40 participants aged 20 to 50 who volunteered from an advertisement and were given $4.50 to take part in the study at Yale University. They were made to believe that they were taking part in a memory and learning experiment and were randomly chosen to be the ‘teacher’ or ‘learner’ in the experiment. However, this was rigged so that the participant was always the teacher while the learner was in fact a confederate who pretended to receive electric shocks. When they answered a question incorrectly, the teacher was instructed by an experimenter to give the learner an electric shock, and for each question the voltage increased in increments of 15 volts up to a fatal 450V. The teacher could not see the learner as they were in another room but could hear screams every time a shock was administered. These became louder and louder until 300V where there was no response, implying the learner was no longer conscious. All participants obeyed up to 300V and 65% went on to give the maximum 450V. The findings show that ordinary people are likely to follow even extreme orders from an authority figure, which helps to explain atrocities such as the holocaust where ordinary people obeyed orders from Hitler and the Nazis, leading to the genocide of millions of innocent people.