Stanley Milgram‘s famous electric shock experiments sought to find out how far ordinary people would go in obeisance to an authority figure. Participants played the part of teachers who had to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks to learners who didn’t respond correctly. The teacher was supposed to give the learner five trials to complete a task, by memorizing contents and asking questions. Stanley Milgram’s classic research into obedience to authority figures shows just how easily we can be persuaded to do things we know to be wrong. In his original study, volunteers were asked to deliver electric shocks to another person if they heard them utter certain words, despite knowing that what they were doing was wrong. They were given headphones so that they couldn’t hear the screams of the victim, who was actually an actor playing the part of someone being shocked. The volunteer had no idea whether they were inflicting actual pain on the “learner”, and were only told that the aim of the study was to find out how much punishment subjects could be made to inflict on others. Some volunteers stopped after administering shocks of around 300 volts, while others kept going until they reached the maximum voltage – 450 volts. Surprisingly, two-thirds of participants continued till the ‘XXX’ sign of 450 volts till the end of the study.
Mind and brain
In many cultures around this world, there is the view that humans have a soul that exists independently of the physical body. For Greek philosophers, the soul was also viewed as the seat of our reasoning abilities - what we would call our minds today. While Aristotle...
