Home > Encyclopedia of Psychology > Milgram's Obedience Experiment

A controversial experiment on conformity and obedience conducted in the early 1960s.

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), an American experimental psychologist at Yale University, conducted a series of experiments on conformity and obedience to authority. In these experiments, Milgram recruited subjects—ordinary citizens—through newspaper advertisements offering four dollars for one hour's participation in a "study of memory." When the subject arrived at the experimental laboratory, he or she was assigned the role of "teacher," and asked to read a series of word pairs to another subject, or learner. The teacher-subject then would test the learner's ability to recall the pairs by...