RESULTS OF THE OBEDIENCE EXPERIMENT "I am forever astonished that when lecturing on the obedience experiments in colleges across the country, I faced young men who were aghast at the behaviour of the experimental subjects and proclaimed they would never behave in such a way, but who, in a matter of months, were brought into the military and performed without compunction actions that made shocking the victims seem pallid. In this respect, they are no better and no worse than human beings of any other era who lend themselves to the purposes of authority and become instruments in its destructive processes." Stanley Milgram Milgram polled 40 psychologists before the experiment asking them at what point they believed the subject-teacher would break off, stop giving shocks and defy the experimenter. The psychologists believed that less than 1% of the hpothetical subjects would administer the maximum 450 volts shock. They gave a figure of one subject in a thousand. In practice 65% of subjects were fully obedient administering the maximum shock until they were told to stop. This percentage did not alter when the group of test subjects were women. The following table shows the number of subjects who break off at each shock level: Level: Volts No of subjects: male female First Level 15 Second Level 30 Third Level 45 Fourth Level 60 Fifth Level 75 Sixth Level 90 Seventh Level 105 Eighth Level 120 Ninth Level 135 1 Tenth Level 150 5 4 Eleventh Level 165 1 1 Twelfth Level 180 1 2 Thirteenth Level 195 Fourteenth Level 210 1 Fifteenth Level 225 Sixteenth Level 240 Seventeenth Level 255 Eighteenth Level 270 2 Nineteenth Level 285 1 Twentieth Level 300 1 1 Twenty-first Level 315 3 2 Twenty-second Level 330 1 Twenty-third Level 345 1 Twenty-fourth Level 360 1 Twenty-fifth Level 375 Twenty-sixth Level 390 Twenty-seventh Level 405 Twenty-eighth Level 420 Twenty-ninth Level 435 Thirtieth Level 450 25 26 pecentage of obedience 65% 66% The thresholds at The Tenth Level and the Twenty-first Level were most likely prompted by the Learners increasing discomfort. At The Tenth level for the first time he asks to be released from the experiment and at the Twentieth level he refuses to answer any more questions. At the Twenty-first level he is heard to scream in absolute agony and demand once more to be released. These statistics are probably some of the most significant in the history of psychology. They show the inadequacy of the profiling models that psychologists were working with at the time, and to a large extent reflect a wider set of assumptions about human nature. The results surprised Milgram as much as the wider psychology community. Ultimately they force us to entirely reassess the susceptibility of human behaviour to conform and respond to authoritative social structures, irrespective of any moral or ethical dilemma that they face.