Authority
Stanley Milgram was a psychologist who was interested in obedience. He designed an experiment to measured how willing people were to do what an authority figure told them to do. The experiment had three participants. The person running the experiment told one participant, the volunteer, to pretend to be a teacher. Another participant was an actor, but the volunteer didn't know this. The actor's role was to be the teacher's student. The actor and the volunteer were separated with a wall. The person running the experiment told the volunteer to test their "student"'s ability to remember pairs of words. When the teacher's "student" remembered a pair of words incorrectly, the experimenter told the teacher to give the student an electric shock from an electroshock generator. The electric shocks were not real, but the volunteer did not know this. Every time the student got a question wrong, the voltage of the shock went up by 15 volts. In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65% of the volunteers gave the highest shock. It was 450 volts. Milgram had two theories for why he got the results he did.