Michelle: Mark, I have a number for you: sixty-five percent. Mark: Okay... sixty-five percent of what? People who secretly think cats are plotting world domination? Michelle: Close. Sixty-five percent of ordinary people, just like us, who were willing to deliver a potentially lethal electric shock to a complete stranger, simply because a man in a lab coat told them to. Mark: Whoa. Okay, that's... not a fun fact. That's terrifying. Michelle: And that terrifying number is at the heart of the book we're discussing today: Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. Mark: Milgram... I know that name. Weren't his experiments famously controversial? Michelle: Absolutely. They're a cornerstone of social psychology, but they also sparked a huge ethical debate. And what's fascinating is the context. He started these experiments at Yale in 1961, right as the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was unfolding. Milgram, who was Jewish, was haunted by the question: How could ordinary people participate in the Holocaust? He wanted to see if the 'just following orders' defense held any real psychological weight. Mark: So he wasn't just curious, he was trying to understand one of the darkest chapters in human history. That adds a whole other layer of gravity to it. Michelle: It does. He set out to create a situation in his lab that could measure the raw power of authority when it clashes with a person's conscience.

Mark: Okay, so how on earth do you even begin to test something like that in a laboratory? Michelle: With a very clever, and very deceptive, setup. Milgram put an ad in the New Haven newspaper, looking for men to participate in a "study of memory and learning." It was all very official, very scientific. Mark: So people just volunteered, thinking they were helping with a normal university study. Michelle: Exactly. When a volunteer arrived, he'd meet another participant, who was actually an actor, a confederate in the experiment. They were told one would be the "teacher" and the other the "learner." They'd draw slips of paper from a hat to decide, but the draw was rigged. The real subject was always the teacher. Mark: Always the teacher. Okay, I'm already feeling the setup. Michelle: The learner, this friendly, mild-mannered man, was then taken into an adjacent room and strapped into a chair with electrodes attached to his wrists. The teacher was seated in front of an imposing shock generator. This machine had a row of 30 switches, starting at 15 volts and going all the way up to 450 volts. Mark: 450 volts! What did the labels say? Michelle: That's the chilling part. They had labels ranging from "Slight Shock" to "Intense Shock" and, at the very end, two switches ominously marked "Danger: Severe Shock" followed by "XXX." Mark: Oh, come on. "XXX"? That's straight out of a horror movie. Michelle: To make it feel real, the teacher was given a sample shock of 45 volts. They felt it. They knew the machine was real and that it was painful. Mark: Okay, so they knew it hurt. That's a crucial detail. Michelle: The task began. The teacher would read a list of word pairs, and the learner had to remember them. For every wrong answer, the teacher was instructed to deliver a shock, increasing the level by one switch each time. Mark: And the learner, the actor, starts making mistakes. Michelle: He does. And the protests begin. At 75 volts, there's an audible "Ugh!" At 120 volts, he shouts that the shocks are becoming painful. At 150 volts, it's a turning point. The learner cries out, "Experimenter, get me out of here! I won't be in the experiment any more! I refuse to go on!" Mark: 150 volts. He's explicitly withdrawing consent. He's begging to be let out. Surely, this is where everyone stops. I would stop. You would stop. Anyone would stop. Michelle: That's the logical assumption. When the teacher turns to the experimenter, this calm, authoritative figure in a grey lab coat, the experimenter responds with a sequence of four standardized "prods." First, "Please continue." If the teacher hesitates again, "The experiment requires that you continue." Then, "It is absolutely essential that you continue." And finally, "You have no other choice, you must go on." Mark: "You have no other choice." That's a heavy statement. But it's not a threat. He's not holding a gun to their head. Michelle: Not at all. It's pure psychological pressure. And before he ran the experiment, Milgram asked groups of psychiatrists, college students, and middle-class adults to predict the outcome. They all said virtually no one would go past 150 volts. They predicted that only a tiny, pathological fringe, maybe one or two people in a hundred, would go all the way to 450 volts. Mark: See! That's exactly what I would have predicted. You'd have to be a sadist to keep going when a man is screaming in pain. Michelle: And here is the result that shook the world of psychology. In that first experiment, with the learner's protests audible from the next room... 26 out of 40 subjects, sixty-five percent, obeyed the experimenter and went all the way to the final 450-volt switch. Mark: Wait. Sixty-five percent? That can't be right. They went all the way to the "XXX" switch, even after the learner had fallen silent, presumably unconscious or worse? Michelle: All the way. They would press the 330-volt switch, hear an agonized scream, and then... silence. The experimenter would instruct them to treat the silence as a wrong answer and to continue. And they did. They trembled, they sweated, they bit their lips, they laughed nervously—one man had a violent seizure—but they kept pressing the switches.

Mark: Okay, my mind is blown. 65 percent. I just can't wrap my head around why. These weren't bad people, right? They were just regular folks from New Haven. Michelle: Exactly the question Milgram asked. He realized the result was so extreme that he had to figure out the "why." So to answer it, he started tweaking the experiment, like a master watchmaker, to see which gears made obedience tick. This is where it gets really fascinating. Mark: He ran variations? Michelle: Many of them. He wanted to isolate the different forces at play. One of the most powerful factors he tested was proximity. What happens when you can't ignore the victim? Mark: You mean, when he's right there in the room with you? Michelle: Precisely. In one variation, the "Proximity" condition, the learner was moved into the same room, just a few feet from the teacher. Now, the teacher could see and hear him. In this setup, obedience dropped to 40 percent. Mark: That's a significant drop, but still shockingly high. Michelle: But then he pushed it even further. In the "Touch-Proximity" condition, the learner would refuse to put his hand on the shock plate after 150 volts. The experimenter then ordered the teacher to physically hold the man's hand down on the plate to deliver the shock. Mark: Oh, no. That's a whole different level. You're no longer just pressing a button; you're physically forcing this man to be shocked. It's like you said, it's easier to be a drone pilot than to confront someone face-to-face. The distance sanitizes the act. Michelle: And the results show that. In the Touch-Proximity condition, full obedience dropped to 30 percent. Physical contact made it much harder to obey. But Milgram also discovered a force that was even more powerful than proximity in breaking the spell of authority. Mark: What could be more powerful than having to touch the person you're hurting? Michelle: The power of the group. In another brilliant variation, he had two other "teachers" in the room with the real subject. These two were actors. At 150 volts, the first actor-teacher stood up and said, "I don't think I can do this," and sat in a corner of the room. At 210 volts, the second actor did the same. The real subject was left alone to decide whether to continue. Mark: Ah, so it's the power of seeing someone else be the first to break the awkward silence. It gives you permission to trust your own gut. Michelle: It's a powerful permission slip. With two peers rebelling, full obedience plummeted to just 10 percent. Thirty-six out of forty subjects defied the experimenter. It shows that while one person might feel helpless against authority, a group can be incredibly strong. Mark: So these variations start to give us a map of why people obey. It's not just one thing. It's about distance, it's about social support... Michelle: And it's about responsibility. This is the core of Milgram's theory. He proposed that when we enter a hierarchical system, we can undergo a critical psychological shift. He called it moving from the "autonomous state," where we see ourselves as responsible for our actions, to the "agentic state." Mark: The agentic state? What does that mean? Michelle: It means we come to view ourselves as an agent for carrying out another person's wishes. We see ourselves as an instrument. And once that happens, we no longer feel responsible for what we do. The responsibility, in our minds, belongs to the authority figure. One subject, after going all the way, said, "I was just doing what I was told." Mark: So it's a mental loophole. 'It's not my fault, I'm just a tool in the hands of the experimenter.' Michelle: Exactly. And this is amplified by what Milgram called the "fragmentation of responsibility." In one variation, the subject didn't press the final shock switch. They just performed a subsidiary task, like reading the word pairs, while another person (an actor) pressed the switch. In that condition, 37 out of 40 people went all the way. When you're just a small cog in a destructive machine, it's psychologically easy to ignore the final consequence.

Mark: So what's the big takeaway here? Are we all just a few bad orders away from being monsters? Michelle: I think Milgram's work suggests it's not about being inherently good or evil. It's about the immense power of the situation. He showed that the right—or wrong—context can make decent people cede their moral responsibility. The most chilling part is that "agentic state" we talked about—that psychological shift where we stop seeing ourselves as the author of our actions and become a mere instrument. That's the danger zone. Mark: So what can we do? How do we stay in what he called the 'autonomous state'? Michelle: Milgram's own variations give us the playbook. First, close the distance. We have to consciously acknowledge the humanity of the people our actions affect. The further away they are, the easier it is to dehumanize them. Mark: That makes sense. Don't let them become just a name on a spreadsheet or a blip on a screen. Michelle: Second, refuse to have your responsibility fragmented. If you're part of a process, own the entire outcome, not just your small piece of it. And third, and maybe most importantly, find allies. The moment one person questions authority, the spell can be broken. As we saw, the support of just two peers was enough to almost completely dismantle the experimenter's power. Mark: It’s about consciously choosing to remain the author of your own actions. That's a powerful thought. We'd love to hear from our listeners. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt pressured by authority? How did you handle it? Share your stories with us on our social channels. Michelle: It's a question worth asking ourselves, because these experiments, as controversial as they were, hold up a mirror. And the reflection isn't always comfortable, but it's profoundly important. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.