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How did allowing participants to choose shock levels change the results of the Milgram experiment?

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Stanley Milgram American social psychologist Stanley Milgram with the “shock generator” used in his famous experiment at Yale University in the 1960s.

In one of the variants of the Milgram experiment, participants were permitted to select their own voltage levels rather than being instructed to increase the intensity by an authority figure. In this version of the study, only about 2.5% of the participants chose to use the maximum shock level.1

This result indicated that, without the direct prompting and pressure of an authority figure, the participants were not inclined to administer the most severe shocks. This finding stands in stark contrast to the original study, where 65% of participants were convinced to proceed to the maximum voltage level under the direction of the experimenter.1