Why did Stanley Milgram become interested in obedience to authority?

Stanley Milgram’s interest in obedience to authority was deeply rooted in his personal background and the historical context of the Holocaust. As a Jewish man, he was acutely aware of the atrocities committed during that period and sought to understand the psychological factors that lead individuals to inflict harm on others under the direction of an authority figure.12

When he began his research at Yale University in the early 1960s, Milgram hypothesized that Americans, who were culturally associated with individualism, would be less likely than Germans to obey orders that caused harm to others. He and his students initially predicted that only a very small percentage of people—roughly 1 to 3 percent—would be willing to administer the most extreme levels of electric shock.21

Ultimately, his experiments revealed that a surprisingly high number of participants were willing to continue inflicting pain when prompted by an authority figure, providing significant, albeit controversial, insight into human social behavior and the power of social pressure.12