Britannica
Sources used in this answer
Who played the learner in the Milgram experiment?
Created from Britannica articles
using AI.
AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
Stanley Milgram
American social psychologist Stanley Milgram with the āshock generatorā used in his famous experiment at Yale University in the 1960s.
In the Milgram experiment, the person acting as the "learner" was not a volunteer participant, but rather an actor hired by Stanley Milgram.
While the volunteer participants were led to believe that the roles of "teacher" and "learner" were assigned randomly, the process was fixed so that all volunteers were assigned the role of teacher, while the hired actors were assigned the role of the learner.12