Describe Milgram's obedience study

Milgram was interested in why so many people can carry out inhumane acts when instructed by someone in authority, in particular the Nazi soldiers in World War 2. He questioned whether people could be held accountable for their actions if they were obeying orders. Milgram recruited male participants through a newspaper advertisement, and set up an experiment where the participant was the 'teacher' and another 'participant' was the 'learner'. The learner was actually a confederate who was taken into another room so he couldn't be seen. The teacher was required to sit infront of a row of switches which represented different voltages and test the learner on a set of learned word pairs. If the learner got any of the pairs wrong, the teacher was told by the researcher to administer a shock, which increased in voltage every time a mistake was made, though the confederate was not actually harmed in any way. If the teacher showed any resistance to shock the learner, prods were given such as 'you have to go on' and 'you're not responsible for this' to persuade them to continue. All participants reached 300V and around two thirds reached the highest voltage which would have been lethal, even though screams and pleads from the confederate to stop could be heard. This experiment showed how obedient people could be, even when they knew they were causing physical harm to another person.The lack of responsibility the participant had, not being able to see the learner (only hear him) and being told they had no choice by someone in authority were deemed important factors. Many other variations of the experiment were carried out such as receiving the instructions over the phone, being in the same room as the learner, being in a less impressive setting and having social support from another person, which all decreased obedience. Although this was an experiment with many ethical issues, the results help us understand why some people act out of character when given orders and what situational factors can increase this obedient behaviour.