How were the teacher and learner roles secretly arranged in 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 the Milgram experiment, the assignment of roles was intentionally deceptive. Although volunteers were told they would be randomly assigned to the role of either "teacher" or "learner," the process was rigged.1

In reality, the random draw was fixed so that every actual volunteer participant was assigned the role of the teacher, while the learner role was always filled by an actor. This deception was central to the study's design, as it allowed Stanley Milgram to observe how participants would respond to an authority figure's instructions to administer increasingly painful electric shocks to another person.1

It is important to note that the use of such deception, along with the failure to provide adequate informed consent and the significant psychological distress caused to participants, is widely considered unethical by modern scientific standards. Ethical research must prioritize the well-being and autonomy of participants, and the methods employed in these experiments would be rejected by the scientific community today.1