Chad Silverstein’s YouTube video ("The Shock of Obedience: Milgram's Findings") summarizes Stanley Milgram’s 1960s obedience experiments, describing the staged 'teacher–learner' shock procedure and the surprising majority willingness to continue administering increasingly intense shocks when instructed by an authority. The speaker connects the findings to broader concerns about influence, leadership, moral courage, and the need for self-awareness to resist harmful authority.
Chapters
One of the most jaw dropping experiments in psychology has to be what Stanley Milgram did in the 1960s when he ran an experiment to see how far people would go to be obedient to authority and even if that meant hurting someone else. And so what he did was he would bring someone in as the subject of the experiment and he would tell them that they're going to bring someone in and they're going to teach them something. And it's like a learning experiment. And when the person gets an answer wrong, they're going to administer a shock. And they told them it wouldn't be life threatening. And what the person didn't know was that that other individual who they were teaching was in on it. And so they put them in another room and they could hear them. And the instructor stood above the individual who was the subject of the experiment. And they would go through this process of learning something. And every time the person got an answer wrong, the instructor said, shock him. And as the experiment went on, the shocks got more intense. And to make a long story short, we got to a point in this experiment where they were shocking and the individual was screaming in pain. He was trying to see how far can someone be influenced to shock someone and cause this pain just because there's an authority figure standing over them. This was a result of, in World War II, trying to figure out how could the Nazis get so many people to do so many horrific and terrible things to people. And there's real power and influence, and there's real power in having an obedience to an authority figure that people are scared of. And it's amazing what the results of this study showed and that the majority of the people just kept shocking this individual knowing how much pain they were causing, even though they really weren't causing the pain. They didn't know that, but that when the instructor kept telling him to keep doing it, they did it. 150 volts. It's just unbelievable. And it's such a good example of why it's important to know what you believe and why you believe it so that you're not influenced so heavily by someone else. It's. It's sad how easily we can be influenced. And the fact that we're so brainwashed today by all of the people who are trying to get our attention, to get us to think and do what they want us to do and to believe what they want us to believe and how mindlessly we can go through life and not think about it for ourselves. It requires you to stop and pause and reflect and most people don't like to spend time with themselves. They don't like who they are. They don't even know who they are. And so it takes real courage to be able to do the inner work that's necessary to become your own biggest influence. And what we learned from that experiment is that there's a real fear in having an authority figure. So you have to think about who in your life. Maybe it's your boss, maybe it's someone in your family, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a coach who influences in a way that makes you do things or think things that you don't agree with, but yet you still do them. And you have to really have some self awareness to be able to take a stand and be able to say no. And so they looked at the individuals who stopped the experiment when they heard the people yelling, and all of them had something in common. And that was that they had a very strong moral or faith or something in their core that they knew what they were doing was wrong and they weren't gonna let some instructor tell them otherwise. Can't you check in and see if he's all right, please? But that's not easy. It sounds easy, but you have to ask yourself what you would do in that scenario. Because going into an experiment like that, I don't think anyone would have said that they would have administered pain just because some authority figure told them to keep doing it. Yet they did it. And yet World War II did occur and people did terrible things to other human beings. And yeah, that's the power of influence, the power of a leader. And with every good thing, there's bad things and how you use your power. And so you're either using your power to, you know, bid people to your authority figure and your power hungry attitude, or you're getting them to do something positive, to have a positive impact in this world on others and building great relationships and depending on who you are and what you believe, that will determine how you influence other people and how you're influenced. So the question is, what do you believe and who's your biggest influence in your life?
