“Under what conditions would a person obey authority who commanded actions that went against conscience is exactly the questions that I wanted to investigate.”
“You don’t ask what people would do given this hypothetical situation you put them in the situation.”
Although this experiment is unethical, I do believe that it is very interesting as to how people respond to the hypothetical scenarios. He wanted to investigate whether Germans were particularly obedient to authority figures as this was a common explanation for the Nazi killings in World War II. These two quotes prove that a theory on paper is much different then when placed in reality. Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person. The experiment in which the electric shock was given every time the learner makes a mistake, increasing the level of shock each time. It was strange to see how much pain an individual would go through to authority.