This wasn't the latest horror movie on Netlfix. This was from a show called Curiosity. And the experiment is real. It's called the Miligram experiment, and it originally was done in the 60's. The setup is fake. The scientist and the learner are actors, but the teacher doesn't know that.
A summery of the study, courtesy of the Wikipedia article linked above:
Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.[4]
Time after time, the teacher continued to shock the learner. You could see the discomfort in their faces, but when the experimenter told them to continue, they did. Of the 12 people they showed on this show, only one chose to not give any shocks at all. And even she left the learner strapped into the chair, leaving him to be tortured by someone else.
I sat there in complete shock and cried into the fur of my poor Red Beast. My cat's back was soaked by the time the show was over. Last night, I couldn't sleep, and this morning I woke up in tears. The thought that people would willingly go along and hurt someone, just because someone else said that it was ok, is appalling. Even worse, few of the participants asked to see the learner to make sure he was ok. And for those that did ask, not one of them bothered to get up and open the fucking door and check on the man.
Listen up, fellow humans. The only thing you have to do in life is die. That's it. Everything else is a choice that YOU make. Half of the participants in the show stated that if the learner got hurt, it was the experimenter's fault. Wrong! Wrong wrong wrong. It was THEIR fault, because they were the ones who pushed the button. They made the choice.
Please. Don't be the one who pushes the button just because someone said so. Think about your actions. Realize that what you do can cause pain and suffering to another person. And for fuck's sake, stand up and do something about it, even if it means disappointing an authority figure!
Towards the end of the show, they ran the experiment again, this time with two teachers. One of the teachers was an actor, who would object to the test and bow out. When the participants had someone to follow, they appeared more likely to bow out, too.
My friend Murphy Brawn writes a similar story here. With the last bit of the show, I suspect the moral there is to be the person who chooses to stand up, in hopes that someone will follow you and do the right thing along with you. As my mom says, if you get the uh-oh feeling, then act on it. If it feels wrong to you, it's probably because it is. Don't just stand there and let it happen. Do something about it.
I guess the other moral of the story, for me at least, is to not watch disturbing shit like this before bed.
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