Definition
The Milgram experiment is the common name for a series of social-psychology studies conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University between 1961 and 1962, designed to measure how far ordinary adults would go in obeying instructions from an authority figure when those instructions conflicted with their personal conscience.
In the canonical version, participants believed they were administering escalating electric shocks to another participant (actually an actor) as part of a study on learning and memory. Despite the actor's increasingly distressed reactions — screams of pain, demands to stop, eventual silence — 65% of participants continued to the maximum 450-volt level, with the only encouragement being a calm "the experiment requires that you continue" from an experimenter in a gray lab coat.
Why it matters
How it works
The participant was told they were the "teacher" in a learning experiment. The "learner" (the actor) gave answers; wrong answers were punished with escalating shocks. The shock levels were labeled from "slight" to "danger: severe shock" to "XXX." When the participant hesitated, the experimenter gave one of four scripted prompts ("please continue," "the experiment requires that you continue," "it is absolutely essential that you continue," "you have no other choice — you must go on") and otherwise did not respond.
The experimenter was the entire authority signal: a man in a gray lab coat, in a Yale lab, holding a clipboard. There was no threat, no incentive, no force. The 65% obedience came purely from the perceived legitimacy of the authority and the gradual commitment to a behavior that had escalated in small increments.
Milgram interpreted the result through what he called the agentic state — under perceived legitimate authority, people mentally outsource moral responsibility, becoming agents executing instructions rather than autonomous actors. This framing has shaped subsequent decades of work on obedience, conformity, and institutional ethics.