“Stanley Milgram wasn’t pessimistic enough about human nature?” by David Gross

A landmark of social psychology research was “The Milgram Experiment,” but a new look at the audio tapes and other evidence collected during that experiment suggests that we may have been interpreting it incorrectly. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the experiment, showing how it is typically portrayed:

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram… intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiments unexpectedly found that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, with every participant going up to 300 volts, and 65% going up to the full 450 volts.

I don’t know about that “unexpectedly” part. I think the researchers suspected, in the wake of e.g. the Holocaust, that people were generally willing to obey awful instructions in ways that they failed to account for. Their experiment was designed to answer not whether but how much.

Interpreting [...]

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Outline:

(01:25) Interpreting the results

(03:57) A new review of the evidence

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 28th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ogapPTArhBM6abSJj/stanley-milgram-wasn-t-pessimistic-enough-about-human-nature

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.