Milgram's Obedience to Authority Experiment 2009, 3/3

BBC TV May 2009

Now at this point I should tell you that you've not been producing any shocks.

Oh, really?

You haven't been administering any shocks.

Oh, haven't I?

No.

But where, where's he gone?

He's coming around here now.

I'm all right. [Laughing]

Nothing monumental.

I realized when you went silent you were either dead or you weren't actually plug into it anymore.

Hello.

I'm Mike Portillo.

Hello.

How did you do?

Fine.

Do you mind if we ask you some questions?

No, of course not.

You looked as if you were under some stress.

Oh, did you see me?

I could see you.

[Laughing]

Where were you?

There's a camera in there.

[Laughing]

OK.

You looked as if you were under some stress.

I found it quite stressful, yeah, yeah, I did.

But you went on.

I did, yeah. Because the man behind me said that it wasn't going to damage him long term, so.

So if by chance, you had hurt Nick, whose responsibility would that have been?

Well, in the eyes of the law it would have been my fault and morally it would have been

my fault and I could have argued that I was following a procedure laid out for an experiment

and perhaps blamed science but in reality it would have been me pressing buttons.

And even with the burden of the knowledge that morally you might have been responsible

for a man's death, you went on?

Hm.

I'm not entirely pleased about that but I did, yeah.

How did you interpret Nick's silence after about 370 volts?

I don't know, I didn't actually, it didn't, I didn't actually probably think about it.

But maybe I probably should have but I didn't think about it that much.

So, my job was to read the list, so.

Philip was one of the three who refused to complete the test.

But you were involved in an important scientific experiment and The Professor was telling

you to go on, why did you disobey?

It sounds a little bit like the Nazis in Second World War Germany.

It wasn't me - I was told to do it.

The majority of the people go all the way.

That's scary!

To 450 volts.

I find that scary.

This has been an extraordinary experience for me.

I had the first fight of my life.

I saw myself change into a paranoid through lack of sleep.

Well, I've met people who've committed dismayed acts of violence.

But most shocking of all was to see normal people like me apparently inflict horrific torture

on others.

Evidently, we can convince ourselves in certain circumstances that violence is absolutely justified.

When I started to look into this, I thought of violence as something that other people did.

And now I see for the first time that it is not some malevolent force out there,

it's very much in us.

In you, in me, in every one of us.