Deceptive Experiments
Topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to the use of deception in research. Arranged in descending chronological order.
Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid
 |  |
Categories
|
The Obedience Experiment (Early 1960s)
 Imagine that you've volunteered for an experiment, but when you show up at the lab you discover the researcher wants you to murder an innocent person. You protest, but the researcher firmly states, "The experiment requires that you do it." Would you acquiesce and kill the person? When asked what they would do in such a situation, almost everyone replies that of course they would refuse to commit murder. But Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment, conducted at Yale University in the early 1960s, revealed that this optimistic belief is wrong. If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers. |